It looks to me that Google has abandoned their own icon design guidelines for Launcher icons. I remember a while back reading through some of the original dev guidelines for UI and one particular page that I enjoyed was the Icon Design Guidelines. It has a really obscure and very detailed requirements list for creating a launcher icon. I also noticed that almost no one followed it after looking at horrible icon after horrible icon for apps appear in the market. Don’t get me wrong, if you have a great app with a horrible icon, it doesn’t mean it’s not good, but certainly a good looking app icon can go a long way for first impressions, especially with the Market from 1.5 or below. With the inclusion of screen shots in the newer Donut and beyond market, the app icon is less critical, but still something I will look at. Call me obsessive, but I don’t enjoy opening my Android drawer and finding it filled with ugly or dull app icons. That being said, I also know why no one followed the guideline. Here is just a part of it:
Launcher Icon Design Guideline
Who is really going to go through their icon and ensure it follows that? Apparently, only Google them selves at first. Here are the set of standard app icons included with a vanilla flavor of Android OS v 1.6 and lower.
See, these are all nice and uniform, following the guidelines and they create visually appealing icons, albeit with too much of a cartoonish feel. Well, after viewing some of the Android 2.0 screenshots out there, I noticed all the icons looked different. These are screen shots form a Motorola Droid, the only 2.0 phone out there, and I had asked if they were Moto special icons or generic 2.0 icons, and to the best of anyone’s knowledge these are Android 2.0 icons because the Driod runs a generic Android 2.0. they seem much more simple, loosing the 3D and the cartoonish effect and sticking with a more business like icon.
Launcher Icons from Android 2.0 - Motorola Droid Screenshot
What do you think? Like the new look? Are these the standard icons? Also, for those not on IE or a mobile device, you’ll notice my icons in the website drawer are the older version. I’m going to have to update my icons now as well.
