I had high hopes for iOS 7. It’s designed by Jony Ive, the God of Minimalism, Attention to Detail and Tight T-Shirts. I love his work almost as much as I love Phil Schiller (so huggable!) But Jony… you broke my heart, Jony. WHY DIDN’T YOU OPTICALLY CENTRE THE ‘1’ IN THE CALENDAR APP ICON?
OK, punks. It’s that time of the year again. The time in which a new update to Apple iOS comes out and the calendar hits July 1. Yes, that time. The time I want to take a sledgehammer to my iPhone. The time I want go to an Apple Store and start hitting every genius as retribution for this act of typographic terrorism.
Did really think I was going to let this one slip away? COME ON! No, of course I couldn’t let it pass.
Not until Apple fixes it like it fixed off-centre calendar days, which it corrected just a few months after I wrote a piece excoriating Apple for it.
But I digress. The problem with Apple’s number one being off centre goes back to the very beginning of the iPhone. For some reason, Apple decided to use the bounding box to centre the digits in the Calendar.app’s icon instead of carefully setting them to be optically centred. So what, you ask? You don’t have to be a hawk-eyed genius to see the difference:
The difference is obvious. Despite its bounding box being metrically centered in relation to the icon, the number one feels off-centre. The example on the right shows the correct placement — the one feels optically centred, balanced in relation to the icon.
Does this matter? Not unless you are some detail-obsessed twunt like me.
I had hoped that iOS 7 would fix this, but it didn’t. And in fact the light typography makes the bad positioning even more obvious, like you can see in the image at the top of this article.
If you are reading this, whoever you are at Apple UI design’s department, please, please fix this for the love of all that is sacred and good and made of deep fried rainbow bacon. I can’t stand it anymore.