iOS 7 Design Resources

Recently I told one of my designers I would send him some links for iOS 7 design resources.  Everything I was sending him was already in my iOS Dev notebook on Springpad, which is public and I had previously shared with him, but when I went to look at the Springpad notebook, even expanded in the “blocks” view on a 30″ cinema display, I realized that at a glance the Springpad UI is cluttered and pretty unusable when you start adding a lot of notes.  The fact that most of the thumbnails are pretty meaningless doesn’t help much, either.

Anyway after I wrote the email I realized that this collection of design resources might be useful to others so I decided to post it here.  If anyone has other resources they’d like to share please do leave a comment. Most of these are also in the iOS dev notebook on Springpad

Regarding designing for both retina/non-retina, the key is to design for non-retina in Photoshop, from that one file you can directly export assets as both non-retina and retina using generator (part of Photoshop CC) and including the filenames in your layers (see adobe help link below).  On the last project we did for a client I used the generator feature every time I wanted to export an asset for Xcode from my designer’s PSDs.

This design workflow article is a good start:

My app design workflow

Teehan Lax: 5 Things to Know When  Designing for iOS

Pixel Snapping

Apple Design Guides & Resources

 a designer who is giving away a set of iOS7 inspired line icons

Designing for Retina

• http://bjango.com/articles/designingforretina/
• http://bjango.com/articles/designingforretina2/

Photoshop generator

• http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/generate-assets-layers.html
• http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/2013/09/introducing-adobe-generator-for-photoshop-cc.html?PID=6146833

 Skala Preview – send your designs straight from your computer to your device

bunch of tools I heard about through the Ray Wenderlich podcast:

• Sip: Color picker
• CocoaColor: Color picker
• AppCooker: Mockup tool for iPad
• Blueprint: Mockup tool for iPad
• Prepo: Prepare, share, and preview App artwork and icons

The iOS Dev Tools site – interview about this on that same Ray Wenderlich podcast (episode 4).  There are useful prototyping and design tools in here, too (scroll down to the design section):

•  Canvas
•  iOS Design Cheat Sheet
•  Free vector icons

Some prototyping tools I happened across:

•  Flinto
•  Origami
•  invision