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After wrestling for a little while today with a concept for Launchpad that still isn’t quite right, I turned my attention to Messages. Straight away it was an interesting one; on iOS, the app icon has always been green with a white speech bubble, but on Mac it’s blue, to represent the fact that the app can only send and receive iMessages.
At first I created an icon that closely matched the blue and grey of the current design, but it looked boring, bland and near-identical to the current icon. It just wasn’t quite right. After mulling over it for a while, I started playing with the app a little, and remembered that users can choose to change the message colour to anything they want. With this in mind, I decided to combine colours from both the iOS 7 and OS X designs and bring a little splash of green to the otherwise blue dock.
Right now I’m really loving the freedom that iOS 7 has given me with colours; before, designing icons that were bright made them stand out uncomfortably, but with the new gradients you can create bright, vibrant icons like Messages and iTunes while maintaining a level of consistency.
As always you can grab the icon below, and download the other icons in the project (iTunes, Safari, Mail and the Mac App Store). When you’ve got them, follow this handy tutorial to find out how to apply them.
