dailylicious!

When you develop an app, designing the app’s home screen icon is one of the most important aspects of the process. The icon will be your customers’ daily impression of your app. it represents your app, what it is or what it does, and whether people will identify the app correctly. It’s crucial that this process yields the intended result as the outcome will have a wide ranging effect. Master designer Louie Mantia shares his thoughts on icon design on his personal blog.

Apparently an article set in Baskerville is more believable that the same article delivered in Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans, Trebuchet, or Computer Modern.

A frequent contributor to the New York Times’s Opinionator blog, Morris encouraged readers to peruse a passage from The Beginning of Infinity, by physicist David Deutsch, on the unlikelihood that Earth will be destroyed by an asteroid. Then, he asked them to take a survey on whether they thought Deutsch’s statement was true, and how confident they felt in that conclusion. “Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?” the post’s headline read.

But the poll was a cover—a ruse to get at the real question, how does typography influence our perception of truth? Morris tapped animator Benjamin Berman to develop a program that altered the typeface of the Deutsch passage, such that it appeared to each reader in one of the six randomly assigned typefaces mentioned above. Cornell psychology professor David Dunning helped design the test.

Ever wondered about those Google doodles that adorn the space above the search bar usually occupied by the Google logo? The work is typically done by a small team of designers in California that comes up with various ideas to mark different occasions and somehow humanize the search pages.

Whenever there’s a change to how a Google or a Facebook page looks or operate, there’s bound to be mobs carrying torches and pitchforks demanding a return to the previous version of the website. These mobs are always very vocal and their protests never would go unnoticed but give it time, these complaints would often simply die out and the changes remain. In a few cases though, these groups would succeed in convincing either company to make changes to their latest update.

What these companies do when faced with this mob situation is they would look at the data and act on what they see. Most of the time, the vocal minority does not represent the view of the quiet majority so the new version stays with little or no alteration.

Arun Vijayvergiya, Facebook software engineer:

At the end of the day, we basically do a lot more data (collection) and testing on … how we think our product is performing and what the metrics are that we should be looking at, and we focus more on that than how reporters look at something or how it’s reviewed

Wired puts forward arguments from a number of developers who say that Android apps don’t look as good as iOS apps because they have to make sure the apps don’t mess up on different screen sizes and resolutions. Despite the Android environment having a far greater flexibility and freedom to design apps, it seems that the range of device sizes forces designers to conform to the lower end of the scale whereas having a single screen size for iPhone and iPod touch makes things much easier.

Of course, with iOS apps there’s the issue of retina display on the more recent iPhone, iPod touch, and the latest iPad, but the problem there is less about overall design, more about redrawing elements because the aspect ratio remains the same compared to the older devices. This means the icons and other graphical items as well as placements don’t change, they just need to have higher resolutions.

Essentially, consistency across iOS devices and its SDK makes things easier to come up with well designed apps.