Designing is Shifting Through Various Platforms – Mobile Designing Guide for Designers

Are you an amateur designer or a student of designing who is all set to dig into your first-ever designing project? If mobile designing has been assigned as your first venture, you’ve clicked on the right post as we’ll share with you few things that you need to keep in mind while adjusting designing for different platforms, especially for mobile phones.

Do you remember the apps which your phone had way back in 2009? They had gradient buttons, skeuomorphic icons and textures in the background. Android smartphones had vibrant typography and dark backgrounds. Someone who has a little bit of knowledge on designing will be able to spot the difference between mobile app designing in 2009 and now in 2017. Mobile interfaces nowadays are user-friendly and clear and a simple approach to design makes all the mobile platform look similar to each other.

Designers are also engaging themselves in designing cases for mobile phones with the evolution of the trend of protecting your phone with smart cases. Mobile case designing is yet another area which designers need to be aware of, especially if you want to focus on self-development as a designer.

Principles of style

Google Material Design focuses more on interfaces which are personalized and fluid and iOS has always focuses on intuitive and clear user interfaces. Here are few style features that you should take note of.

While working with an app, having a clear sense of depth is extremely crucial. The user have to concentrate on elements on a screen like input fields, buttons and navigation bars that are vital for completing jobs. Google Material Design utilizes various shadow styles for UI layers. Shadow value relies on Z-axis and this depicts the vitality of UI element. iOS design utilizes background blur, gradients, color overlays which are semi-transparent to obtain similar hierarchy.

The material design palette is closely related to CMYK model rather than that of RGB. The new color design model depends on lighter and darker shades of the main color. The basic color is used user experience accents like item titles, actions, icons and many more. The similar color shades are utilized in drawers, tab bars and different other elements of navigation. The iOS platform, on the other hand, is vibrant and simple. There are few common user elements like bars, list items, backgrounds and other features and most of them are presented in lighter shades of white or black, grey while the icons, links and other buttons come in brighter colors.

There is a stark difference in the hierarchy of typography between Android and iOS. There is a drastic contrast in display and font sizes and the body of the text makes content seem more playful and vivid on both iOS and Android platforms. On any Android screen, the contrast is gained by thin typefaces and larger sizes. If you take into account iOS 11, the contrast will be visible through weight hierarchy with tiny captions and headers that are extra bold.

One more thing you need to take note of is that titles and text in Android are left-aligned on the screen, particularly when navigation elements are concerned. While designing for iOS, the designer should put the smaller captions and action buttons at the center. The subtitles, titles and text body should be left-aligned.

Google Material design motivates designers to use flat icons and iOS designing prefers 1px or 2px line icons. This is one of the most vital style details which a designer should consider while adjusting any app for mobile platform. If there’s a definite style for your icon, there’s no hard-and-fast rule that you have to follow. If you take a look at the brand new lock screen in iOS 11, you will start believing in the fact that designers are gradually moving far away from the exact rule behind outline icons.

On Android devices with high resolution, a one-pixel stroke can look great but at the same time you shouldn’t forget that Android design should be impactful on majority of the screen densities. In such situations, the developer requires rethinking elements of design and account for various cases in the coding of the apps.

The brand new icons of Android are adaptive and this means they’re designed in such a manner that it fits various mask shapes through different device platforms. However, iOS app icons are restrained to the same round rectangle shape.

The use of brand colors and the shades are more dominant in material design. On the other hand, iOS guidelines suggest a subtle approach towards branding. Branding in iOS should only be seen in UI elements like display, icons, links and buttons.

Therefore, if you’re a designer who is all set to start off with your designing portfolio on mobile devices, keep in mind the above mentioned factors to stay an edge over others.