iOS 7 first repulse

Follow up of the iOS 7 UI redesign

Pritam Pebam
I. M. H. O.
Published in
2 min readJun 10, 2013

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Probably the only reason why I was watching the WWDC was because of the expected announcement of the ‘flat’ redesign of iOS.

To my disappointment, the redesign seems to have gone a little off-track to me. Some of the visual redesign seems incomplete wireframes which literally kept me thinking it could’ve been a mistake.

Anyway IMO, Windows did a lot better with metro style design in terms of visual aesthetics and it also does fulfills their philosophy of serving the ‘content before chrome’.

With iOS7 redesign, honestly, the visuals look ‘terrible’ to me. Although I find some of the interactions pretty interesting (burrowed or not), most of the visual looks sparingly mundane and blunt.

Probably an attempt to a come-back of the 90s, the gradient fill along with the color choice makes it look saturated; or a little too vivid for the eye… although one can argue base on each individual’s taste.

In another blog, someone has written “How do you differentiate between clickable buttons and text?”. Visually non-differentiable change in color?

The icons also seem to be highly abstract that at some point, one entirely misses the point. Although I quite like the “Photo” icon, with the rest, I feel in it’s attempt to stay away from the much debated ‘skeomorphic design’, Apple has unintentionaly ended up with this level of “abstract-ness”. Perhaps, you’ll have to get a little ‘use to’ before you can recognize each one of them visually as the metaphorical relation is defunct.

Additionally, there’s been a mixture of different ‘types’ of iconographical entities which doesn’t quite go well together. For instance, the rounded arrow at the top in the control center seems a little comical as compared to the more serious looking glyphical icons on the panel.

However, I can see lots of interesting third party apps coming up fully utilizing the additional 1,700 APIs. I hope they do a better job in their UI and UX design.

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