We’ve just crossed the 25 tee threshold for the official, limited-edition Beautiful Pixels tee on Cotton Bureau. This means that you can now definitely go ahead and order one (or more) for yourself and it’ll be shipped out to you starting April 17th. We still have 11 more days left in the campaign, so you can also help by spreading the word about it. Go ahead, check it out.
Free Icons
With iOS 7 shifting to the flat interface, glyphs have become an even more essential component of App Design. Several icon sets are available on the net, but we at BP found a fantastic set of vector icons, available for free. All you need to do to access 100 of the nicest icons/glyphs we’ve seen is to use ‘Pay with a Tweet’, the social payment system. Simply post a message linking to the website, and they’re yours.
The Making of Tengami
Tengami is a beautiful, atmospheric puzzle game, available as a Universal App for iOS and soon to be available on Windows and OS X. It was reviewed in detail by Mikhail, and it comes heartily recommended.
We came across an article on the development of Tengami, and thought we’d share it because it highlights the excruciating level of detail that goes into making something so stunning. The design decisions and mechanics behind delivering the experience of physical manipulation of Japanese paper to a touchscreen device is a study in innovative thinking and is bafflingly beautiful. The highlight of the piece is the short video on the prototyping that went into gameplay design.
Apple TV – The Next Generation
While we pride ourselves on our painstaking coverage on design on the software side, we often come across beautiful hardware designs that merit a feature here, too. In conjunction with the German tech blog Curved.de, Martin Hajek came up with an incredibly drool-worthy concept for the next generation Apple TV. Designed to match the new iPhone 5s in design and colour choice, these renders are stunning in their simplicity and construction. I especially love the design of the Remote that they’ve worked on. It looks like a redesigned iPod Nano, and is colour matched with its parent Apple TV. The designers even included a version of the remote that could work like a game controller. The attention to detail, such as the inclusion of a lanyard or the ingenious thought of making the Apple TV’s puck an induction charging pad for the Remote, is just so Apple-like.
Seriously, if the rumoured, long-awaited redesign is anywhere close to this concept, it would become just the latest device in the Apple stable that would make people yell, “Shut up and take my money!”. We know we would definitely get one. Or two.
Flatties
Here’s another set of icons for your viewing pleasure. Painstakingly crafted, these beautiful, flat, iOS 7-ready icons are a treat, and they contain some of the most unique designs we’ve ever seen (Daft Punk icons, FTW!). The icons are available at 48 x 48 px in three volumes, each available for $12, or all three together for $30. Seriously, though, at 10¢ per icon for all three volumes, it is a steal. Have a look, you won’t be disappointed.
Littlelu Wallpapers
Japanese artists are traditionally masters at stark, minimalist designs that never compromise on beauty. Their use of simple and elegant brush strokes on textured papers yields some of the most memorable visual poetry on earth. It should come as no surprise, then, that we find this set of wallpapers by Little Lu and Yuchen Liu incredibly appealing. They feature illustrations of cakes (yes), dogs, cats and fish, and fit right in with iOS 7’s minimalist design, including supporting the parallax effect. There are also a couple of icons available, which are also starkly beautiful. If you’ll forgive a bit of poetic license, these wallpapers evoked the feeling of spotting a lush green shoot in the middle of a salt flat.
Prices vary from $3 for each icon, to $10 for a set of three cake-based wallpapers.
What we published this week
– The Side: Pocket Casts 4.5 for Android
– Spend Time on Wikipedia Beautifully with Wikiweb
– Checkmark 2
– Saavn’s iOS 7 Update
– Zippy – Insightful Task Management
– Medium for iPhone