Alt. Icon for Slopes
Designing an alternate icon for Slopes was my first foray into the world of icon design.
Like a movie poster or book cover, an app icon plays a disproportionately important role, given its diminutive size, in conveying the spirit and quality of an application. With millions of applications on the App Store, it first needs to be discovered before an app has a reputation that drives its following. A great icon can make or break this process.
For this reason, my favourite part of an application is the app icon. Those 262,144 lil' pixels inside a standard 512px icon greatly entice me towards or away from an app. And as a Mac/iOS user, I have been spoiled over the years with beautiful icons from outfits like The Iconfactory and designers like Sebastiaan de With, Louie Mantia, Michael Flarup, Gavin Nelson, Matthew Skiles, and more. These designers have helped keep the iOS/Mac community vibrant, creative, and beautiful for years.
Icons created for my 2022 Apple Product tier, Dashboard, and Apple Music Classical.
Over the past year, I have taken a small step towards breaking into the app icon scene, only to quickly discover that icon design is entirely different from creating wallpapers. Icons are small, fickle things whose appearance changes dramatically based on the device it's viewed on. An icon can look gorgeous at 1024px but be a garbled mess at 128px. You want an icon to be prominent but don't want it to unbalance or take away from its neighbours. It should be phenomenal yet unassuming, spectacular but not showy. Is this making sense?
I've done some very simple icon designs for my projects, but I am delighted that I now have an icon inside an honest-to-goodness iOS app. My first official icon was published as an alternate icon for premium subscribers inside Slopes! Slopes is a premier ski and snowboarding application with weather data, trial maps for hundreds of resorts, and detailed run analytics for you and your friends. Slopes is also a 2022 winner of an Apple Design Award, which makes being able to create an icon for such a prestigious app an even more incredible honour.
The inspiration for the icon calls back to the Ski Report widget of Mac OS X, which provided snow conditions, base accumulation, number of open trails, and current weather on a vibrant wood-textured widget.
I wanted the spirit of that widget to live on, and with the Slopes icon, I began with the ski-chalet wood motif backdrop. That was followed up by adding a diamond road sign with a reflective honeycomb texture featuring a high contrast, simplified version of the Slopes logo in white backed onto the apps iconic blue. For any Slopes users out there, I hope you love the new alternate icon!
The final alternate icon for Slopes.
In Sum
App icons do a lot of heavy lifting to quickly grab a user's attention and succinctly convey the spirit and story of an app in an unforgivingly small package. This presents a new and challenging design landscape to experiment in, and I hope to keep creating more designs that might, who knows, one day end up finding their way onto your Home Screen.
