Spot the Bulge
Firstly, apologies if you can’t unsee this after I’ve pointed it out. I doubt many people would notice it, but I did during normal use of my iPhone 6s and it bothers me enough to document it.
So what is it!?
If you look at the new App store icon, introduced in iOS 11 beta 6. It looks as if three sticks have been laid on top of each other in interlocking pattern. I really like this new icon design.
Now, look at the 12 o’clock position where the stick on the left casts a shadow on the stick on the right. Can you see a subtle bulge on the left stick where it casts the shadow? This is a sub-pixel alignment problem due to an object being incorrectly positioned in the original artwork. The mistake is less obvious when the icon is drawn at a smaller size, but it’s still a mistake. Yes, I really do care about this sort of stuff.
I appreciate not everybody will be able to see this without zooming in. So here’s an @3x enlarged screen grab…
“Are you getting it yet?”
Here’s a line drawn along the bulge.
I filed this as radar bug report #34033524 and it was closed as “Engineering has determined that this issue behaves as intended” …which I find disappointing, but not surprising.
I’ve witnessed the problem on my personal iPhone 6s and iPod touch 6th generation devices. Checking the source files from an extracted .ipsw I can see the issue is present on iPhone/iPod touch but not iPad:
It’s an easy mistake to make when preparing final artwork, but really this should have been spotted before it was included in the beta. Especially given that the new icon should have had multiple rounds of revisions and many pairs of eyes on it.
Most people won’t notice this and even if they do they likely won’t care too much about it. But most people aren’t designers at Apple. Thankfully it’s an easy fix.
I’m hoping that there’s somebody on the iOS design team with enough time and inclination to put things right before iOS 11 hits GM. It’s all about the details.
Edit: this was fixed two months later in iOS 11.2 beta 1.
