HENRY FORD FAMOUSLY PROMISED that his company would paint a car any color "so long as it is black." For 12 years between 1914 and 1926, his Model T fleet was a monochrome monolith—just one color, just one style. To Ford, color choice was an unimportant personal whim—a stylistic nicety that had nothing to do with producing cars that were cheap to make and easy to drive. "I thought it was up to me as the designer to make the car so completely simple that no one could fail to understand it," he said, color choice included. Most folks went along: by 1918, the Model T accounted for more than half the cars on the road, a giant swarm of identical black buggies.
Ford was an autocrat (pun intended), and it's hard to imagine his my-way-or-the-highway philosophy going over well with today's car consumer. Yet his design dictates aren't all that different from Apple's vision of a world awash in identical black iPhones, iPads, and iPods (with the concession of the occasional white iPhone). The difference is the software. Our iPhones might look the same, and the hardware might be standard, but the contents are not. We personalize our iPhones with carefully curated app collections. Just as most drivers think of their choice of car (and its color) as a form of self-expression, so it goes with iPhone users and their apps. We feel a personal attachment to our iPhones that's almost unseemly for a techno-gadget. The apps we download somehow say as much about us as the cars we drive or the decorations in our homes. (There's even a website, www.firstand20.com, to showcase the iPhone Home screens of various designers and developers—"MTV Cribs" for the geek set.)
An emotional attachment to software? Because we carry our phones everywhere and use them anywhere, iPhone apps are personal in a way that software has never been before. As an app designer, your interface choices affect not only what your customers can do with their iPhones, but how they feel about them, too. For all of this book's talk about the importance of efficiency and focus in iPhone app design, there's also the elusive matter of style. Granted, your audience expects your app first and foremost to get something done (inform, work, entertain), but you'll win hearts if your app gets it done with style, too. A well-designed interface has the power to charm and beguile.
Obviously, though, Ford was onto something with his relentless focus on standardization. As you saw in the last chapter, relying on familiar design conventions eliminates head scratching and ambiguity for the user. It also makes for easier design and production, whether your assembly line produces Model Ts or iPhone apps. It's not a sin to make an app that uses only standard controls and colors. It might seem bland, but it's also efficient, and "efficient" is often exactly the right personality. Productivity apps like Mail, Things, or Instapaper benefit from their buttoned-down, all-business manner.
Even for productivity apps, though, textural flourishes or sparks of color lend a subtle sense of luxury to standard controls without adding interface chrome or distracting from the task at hand. If you choose to go even further, you can fashion your own bespoke interface that imbues your app with rich atmosphere, charming whimsy, retro nostalgia, high-tech gloss, or hipster savvy. Just be realistic: when you depart from the standard controls and interface metaphors, you've gotta be good. Creating a unique visual identity for an app takes taste and skill, the work of a talented designer. If you want to venture beyond the standard controls and you're not a designer yourself, you should find one or work hard to become one.
This chapter can't do that hard work for you, but it does explore practical strategies for crafting a visual personality for your app. You'll learn techniques for adding color and texture to standard controls, crafting toolbar icons, and creating a sense of luxury by conjuring real-world materials. With those basic skills in hand, you'll go on to discover the dark art of crafting entirely new interface metaphors and controls. Send Mr. Ford's penchant for standardization to the back seat, and let's go for a little ride.
Your design choices—whether conservative or zany—give your app a personality. Just like people, apps are irresistible when their personalities are in tune with both audience and context. An efficient, just-the-facts design lends an air of confidence to a productivity app. Warm wood textures, meanwhile, give other apps an organic feeling that is both homey and luxurious. Don't let your app's personality emerge by accident. Before you start tinkering with color schemes, graphics, and navigation models, consider how you'd like people to perceive your app. Businesslike and authoritative? Comforting and familiar? Sunny and upbeat? Sleek and poised? Homespun and crafty? Gritty and edgy? Fun and toylike? Opulent and plush?
By choosing a personality for your app before you start crafting its visual identity, you give yourself a framework for making consistent decisions based on the emotional vibe you're after. Don't dismiss this as touchy-feely hokum: an emotional vibe is the basis for all marketing and storytelling, and make no mistake, your app is in fact a story. In the very personal context of the iPhone, people think about an app as content more than "software," an experience more than a tool, and entertainment more than a task. Your app's personality sets the mood of that experience and it has to suit its audience as well as the job at hand. When you marry the aesthetics of a thing to both its function and its owner, you get something that is beautiful, functional, and distinct. This feng shui alchemy evaporates when those elements go out of sync, so go carefully as you make your design decisions.
Figure 6-1. Some app designs create outspoken personalities by conjuring very specific atmospheres tailored to context and audience. Voices (left) has a Vaudeville personality appropriate to a funny-voices novelty app. iShots Irish Edition (right) creates a gritty dive-bar ambience for its collection of let's-get-loaded drink recipes.