
All the sizes of iOS app icons - nirmal
http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/708404794/ios-app-icon-sizes
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ZeroGravitas
This icon size fragmentation will doom the iPhone platform!

More seriously, could someone just resize the big one a few times so we can
compare and see what actual benefit is being provided here?

This pixel obsession seems like a useless hangover of the 72ppi desktop days,
just like the "programmer" fonts and pixel-art games that mean so much to
people of a certain vintage but baffle younger folks.

Yes it made a difference then, but every increase in pixel density and
resolution has made it a less and less useful way to spend your time.

Making pixel perfect icons for a platform advertised as having pixels too
small to see seems particularly odd.

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simonsquiff
I've done some quick rescaling examples. Rescaled are to the right on the iOS
ones, above for the OSx ones.

<http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/8020/iosicons.png>

<http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/6851/osxicons.png>

The iOS ones aren't the best example - it's not a complex icon - but you can
still see the hand crafted ones are better, e.g. some of the lines on the
rescaled items are not the desired 1 or 2 px widths and so look blurry (e.g.
the ipad icon); you don't have the texture; and you lose the corner line
definition (e.g. see ipad settings).

The OSx ones are better examples as it's more complex. The scaled icons look
rubbish.

We're not there yet. You still need to tweak icons so they look good at
various sizes - subtle things like 1px lines or highlights still need to
manual tweaking. Pixels too small to see doesn't make the problem go away, you
still want to optimise for resolution so you match the pixel grid for sharp
definition. Some people don't have that attention to detail (and those devs
can just rescale them) but many do - and personally I think it's worth it. And
I appreciate having the opportunity to hand craft rather than have the OS just
scale it for me.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Nice work. For the iOS ones the only one I can really see any meaningful
difference for is the iPad one, and for that one I prefer the scaled version
as it seems more "blueprinty" to me. As with text, sticking to the pixel grid
can cause things to become unexpectedly bold or thin as you change scale.
Similar happens to the smallest size icon too, though it's not as big a
difference.

Tried it on my iPhone too, but wasn't sure how to ensure 1-to-1 pixel scale,
default in Photo viewer seemed like it might be that though.

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smackfu
Does Apple actually have some plan here, or do they just do whatever they need
to to make their apps look good, and all the 3rd party devs just suffer?

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cmelbye
It's Apple, they're going to do whatever makes their product look as good as
it can possibly look. If it means that the 3rd party devs have to create
another icon size (gasp!), then so be it. You're not really required to,
though. You can just resize your iPhone icon to the iPad, iPhone 4, etc sizes
and be done with it. It will not look so good, though.

~~~
davidedicillo
Icon design, as well as logo design, deal with this normally. This is exactly
why people charge you hundreds or thousands for icons and logos... things you
don't really get at 99designs.

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DenisM
What a mess.

~~~
frou_dh
I get the feeling some pixel-wranglers might enjoy creating these optimized
versions if it weren't for the uncertainty around their size/use.

