Maintaining a Consistent Brand Identity

To reinforce your brand identity, you'll want to use the same app icon and logo across all your marketing efforts. If you use too many visual variations for promoting the same iPhone app, you're likely to cause confusion among consumers. By consistently using the same icon and logo, your app's brand will start to become recognizable by people. This familiarity will help consumers easily recall your app name by memory when searching the App Store and recommending your app to friends and family. Having a recognized brand also helps you promote new iPhone apps to those users who are familiar with the visual branding of your previous app.

To reinforce the logo branding of Touchgrind, a popular skateboarding game app, Illusion Labs included the same logo and color palette within various screens of the app, as well as in the app's YouTube video trailer and official web site (see Figure 4-5). For all you nonartists out there, notice that even though the Touchgrind logo is a very simple design, its consistent use is nonetheless quite effective.

Figure 4-5. Illusion Labs uses the same Touchgrind logo within the app Itself (top left), its Touchgrind YouTube video trailer (bottom left), and its Touchgrind.com web site (right) for consistent branding.

If you're porting an existing app to the iPhone from another platform, such as Mac OS X or Windows, then take advantage of the brand equity you've already established by using a similar icon and logo for the iPhone version. This is a great way to attract new customers who are already familiar with your app from another platform.

When Cultured Code created an iPhone version of its award-winning Mac application, Things, it utilized the same branding but modified the icon slightly. The icon is still instantly recognizable as Things and cements the fact that the iPhone app is directly related to its Mac cousin. But the minor design tweak to the iPhone version's icon plays an important role in that not only does it help the image display better as a small 57 x 57 pixel iPhone icon with rounded edges, but it also helps position the iPhone app as its own stand-alone version (see Figure 4-6).

Figure 4-6. The Things Mac icon (left) and the Things iPhone icon (right)

The Things iPhone icon is another great example of an image that is both simple and sophisticated at the same time. Although there are dozens of competing to-do lists and task management apps in the App Store with similar check mark-themed icons, the Things iPhone app stands out from the pack because of its photorealistic icon. It's really quite a simple image, but upon closer examination, what gives the icon that high-quality feel are the little design nuances such as the high-contrast colors, the inner drop shadow on the white square, and the subtle gloss effect on the surrounding blue box. In my opinion, the Things icons for Mac and the iPhone are perfect models of effective app icon design, where less is more—delivering sheer simplicity with visual impact.

As you discovered while experimenting with Photoshop effects and filters during the design of the Breadcrumbs icon example, sometimes the only things separating an amateur drawing from a professional-looking design are a few minor graphical touches.

Continue reading here: Drawing Your Ideas on Paper

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