#DELIVERY STATUS WIDGET MAC OS X#
#DELIVERY STATUS WIDGET PLUS#
#DELIVERY STATUS WIDGET FREE#

After hours spent tweaking it (I’m not even kidding), that glossy highlight turned out to be exactly what it needed. Something wasn’t quite right though in the final stages, it was still lacking depth. Initially I didn’t plan on using the standard glossy curve you see on many of the iPhone’s icons. Gradients and highlights that seemed much too strong in the larger view were often difficult to even see on the iPhone, so I spent a lot of time tweaking, testing, and repeating. So as the design progressed, I added more gradients, blurred the shadows, and used highlights to pull the shapes together. It looked good on the iPhone but blown up it seemed very flat-it looked like a bunch of graphic shapes instead of a cohesive object with depth and form. I also used a lot of hard lines for shadows and highlights initially. Initially I had a dark bumper and lighter grille, but the bumper got lost on the iPhone’s black background so the values were switched. Early on I reduced the number of bars in the grille, as they blurred together on the iPhone when there were more of them. That was a tough, I spent a lot of time struggling with it.

I wanted a design that would work at larger sizes in addition to the small iPhone icon size, so I could use it for the Mac OS X Dashboard widget as well as in promotional materials. (I was careful to roughly match the blue sky in the Weather and Photos icons.) The touch of blue through the window and the yellow headlights help it stand out. I think it’s a perfect fit, and it mingles well with the other iPhone icons. Eventually I settled on a shade of brown that falls somewhere between the old Delivery Status widget icon and the darker brown of a UPS truck. Other bright colors like purple or orange just didn’t seem right to me. Yellow was out because it’d look too much like Panic’s Transmit icon. Red works well for icons like Calendar and FileMagnet but in this case I felt there’d be too much of it. Blue was tempting but there are a lot of blue icons on the iPhone already. I wanted to use something brighter at first. I had to abstract the design somewhat-if this was a real vehicle it’d look very odd-but I think I’ve managed a design that looks striking and unique without looking strange. So I went with something more like a semi. It didn’t quite fit the space though, and I loved the idea of designing the icon as a physical object that just happens to fit perfectly into a rounded square area. I started out sketching the type of vehicle you generally see delivering packages to your door. I knew from the start I wanted to use a delivery truck.

Plus it was a good excuse to finally do what I’ve wanted to do for a while now. Delivery Status touch is different though-that icon will live on people’s home screens and they’ll tap it every time they use the app.

I never spent much time on it because it isn’t seen terribly often, and I couldn’t justify spending a lot of extra time on a free widget that already sucks up a lot of work hours.

The old “18 days” icon I’ve used for the Dashboard widget was just something I threw together quickly. While working on Delivery Status touch (for iPhone and iPod touch) it was clear I needed a new icon. Above you can see how the Delivery Status icon progressed from sketch to finished design.

#DELIVERY STATUS WIDGET MAC OS X#

#DELIVERY STATUS WIDGET PLUS#

#DELIVERY STATUS WIDGET FREE#

Delivery status widget