14th
Delicious Library iPhone
So Delicious Library is out on the App Store and I thought I should write a bit about it. I hope Mischa McLachlan talks about it too since he worked a lot on it too and I’m sure he has lots of amazing stories to tell with his british accent.
I was literally brought onto the project thanks to Mischa just to help a bit (or maybe was it a lot?). I started working right away on some mockups on my side and shared them with Mischa. And of course we would put them on basecamp to show Wil Shipley, Jessie Char and the rest of the amazing Delicious Monster team.
We made lots of different designs and I’ll try to share with you some of them.
Maybe some of you remember the little video I created that Wil shared on twitter (I then also put it on flickr and twitter), well I don’t really remember why I had this idea, probably because I was really excited to work on this and I wanted to make something funny to watch… and also ridiculous, yes. Well for those who don’t know what I’m talking about, here it is:
We made lots of different designs. Actually, there are so many that I will not be able to share them with you but the team knew what they wanted. A list view for the categories, then a list view for the products once you’ve selected a category and finally a card view of the product. About the card view, we made like 30 different designs, seriously I’m not kidding.
So that was one of the early mockups I made and I really hope Mischa also shows what he made for the design and interactions because he created some amazing animations that nobody will see for example.
It’s really different from what the final design looks like. We wanted to go a little bit crazy (hence the name Delicious) and maybe we could try putting some grass and a bright wood but yeah, it looks like crap. However the basic layout was set and that was the main important thing I think. I also created some icons and I changed some of them for the final build. Though, I didn’t have the time to finish all of them so we kept most of Adam Bett’s icons. Now onto another mockup.
We immediately removed the grass and went for something a little less crazy and more “shelf like”. So we created mockups and mockups until this one, which is really close to the final design of the application. This mockup is for the list view of the products. Darker wood for the background and brighter wood for the bars to create more contrast. And yes, I put some stupid things and an actual picture of Mischa when he was young (and with hair!).
Some modifications from Mischa, different wood at the bottom, header bars and green selection bar (that isn’t in the final design) in the list view.
So that’s pretty much it for the old mockups of the first two screens. There’s so many other mockups that I won’t be able to show sadly.
Now onto the card view. We spent A LOT of time into this with different cards designs, here is a couple of them.
That was the first card design I made. You’ll probably notice that the wood background is totally different than the one in the final version. But a problem occurred: there was too many different types of wood and we wanted the application to be consistent within all the screens. Here are some card designs among many:
As you can see, we tried a lot of different things. We even changed the whole layout on some designs that I’m not showing (because I seriously can’t remember where they are, too many psd files).
So as you can see, it’s been a huge amount of work. There was also a whole debate with the gloss thing. Wil wanted to keep the gloss on the bars to be closer to Apple’s default applications feeling, while I understood what he meant I was totally against it simply because I thought (and I still think ;-) ) that gloss on wood is funny. Other than that, it was a really great project and I’m really happy I was involved in its making.
Thanks a lot to the Delicious Team, you guys are amazing and I had lots of fun working on this. A big thanks to Mischa too, I hope you have fun at Apple and I’m glad we could work together on this… and also for the lots of LOLs I have with you almost everyday.
