Case Study – iOS Application Icon Design for FontFuse



FontFuse iOS App Icon Designed by The Logo Smith

I designed this iOS application icon design on behalf of Extensis, for a font management product called FontFuse, which was way back around 2011.

Looking at the screenshots I took of my iPhone way back then; takes me back to how beautifully detailed some of the iOS application icon designs were, especially Tweetbot.

I really miss the aesthetics of those golden times… everything is so flat and blah nowadays.

iOS Application Icon Design by The Logo SMith

 

My iPhone Home Screen circa 2011

Being responsible for any iOS application icon design was/is quite a responsibility, and this was all around the time I designed the Feedly iOS application icon design as well (below). 2011/2012 and either side of those years, was truly a golden time in design.

So much being explored, and relentlessly pushing the boundaries of realism and cramming it all into a little rounded square icon.

Obsessing over Realism

With FontFuse, I clearly remember obsessing over the realism of the orange textured fabric I was using for the app’s inner surface, as well as the more leather/velvet like texture for the front, right down to the orange stitching, and the shadows around the inner edges.

Looking back, the only area I feel needed improvement is the inner shadow around the orange fabric background; its too uniform, but other than that…

On a personal level, I wanted this to look as tactile as one might think it would feel.

iOS Application Icon Design by The Logo SMith

 

About Extensis

Wikipedia: Extensis and its parent company CreativePro.com were sold to ImageX in year 2000, which in turn sold Extensis to Japanese content-management company Celartem Technology in 2002.[2] In 2003, Extensis acquired competitor DiamondSoft and their Font Reserve applications (stand-alone and client-server).[3] In January 2006, Extensis merged its two font management products, Font Reserve and Suitcase into a single product called Suitcase Fusion.[4] In August 2010, Extensis launched WebINK, a web font subscription service.[5] This service was discontinued on July 1, 2015.[6]

In 2018, Extensis united with its sister company, LizardTech, to continue developing and distributing software solutions for compressing and distributing massive, high-resolution geospatial data.[7] With this move, GeoExpress, Express Server, and GeoViewer are a part of the Extensis suite of solutions.