Josh: You have to be careful with the eye candy, though, because if you have too much, you distract from the functionality. In some of the earlier design iterations, we used more gradients and more gloss and shine in places. Since then, we've systematically stopped using gradients in the app. We're using flat colors almost everywhere, except for the icons themselves. Part of that no-gradients decision comes from a style standpoint. We wanted to dial it back a bit. Another part of it, though, is that it also reduces our development time. It's less work for our programmers to go in and write code that uses these flat colors.
Our goal with the design is to create the right frame. In the end, we're celebrating these icons. The app needs to be the appropriate setting for those, and it should highlight them, not distract from them. You have to look at everything as a whole from the top down. It's not just about having a great design but a great design that's appropriate for the device or the environment it resides in.
Early on, we thought about making it look more like an actual passport where you're flipping through the pages and, you know, take the metaphor and just beat it to death. In some ways, that would be really cool, but the flip side to doing this rich immersive graphical treatment is that we realize that the iPhone's not the only platform we want to operate on. We have to keep in mind Android and WebOS and Blackberry. Whatever design we come up with has to translate to those platforms. We don't want the Android version to look like a bad hack of the iPhone version. You have to boil down some of your design elements to very basic, sensible things that can be reused from one platform to the next.