Obsessing over the details

Last night I re-tweeted something that Brandon Walkin said: “The Teehan+Lax iPhone PSD is indirectly responsible for reducing the quality of UI on the App Store.”

I got a few replies this morning asking what I meant by it, so here goes.

First off, the guys at Teehan+Lax do some great work and the first iteration of the iPhone PSD (and subsequent updates) were a god-send to designers/devs everywhere who were quickly trying to flesh out ideas for new apps. However, the buttons are not quite accurate—especially the latest version—and tend to be blurry and a little lower quality than what you would find on a native Apple application.

What I assume Brandon meant was that too many people are simply using these elements from the Teehan+Lax PSD with little attention to detail and are not spending any time of their own to make sure the buttons and icons are up to the Apple standard.

In my opinion, the Teehan+Lax stuff was always about having some assets to use to quickly iterate on design ideas, not to serve as the final product. If you want your applications to truly shine you have to sweat the small stuff. After all, if we have learned one thing from Steve Jobs its that success is all about obsessing over the details.