Sebastiaan de With

http://icondesigner.net/

I’m Sebastiaan de With, a 21-year old freelance visual designer specializing in icons and UI. Most people know me from the Cocoia Blog, where I post about my design process and do teardowns of significant changes in interfaces. Others know me from my work for companies like HTC, Mozilla, HP, frogdesign, T-Mobile and various independent Mac developers. I also run a website that lets people learn how to design icons, Icon Resource.

I’ve used the standard iPhone home screen without Stocks (adding a Twitter client or Things) for years, but recently I’ve started to allow more third-party apps on it. I can’t stand the icons on my home screen that I find less than native-looking – for instance, the double inner bevel of the Ego icon – but functionality won out against aesthetics in the end. The balanced out-of-the-box home screen of the iPhone 3G is fantastic (the 3GS ruined it with the horrible Voice Notes and Compass icons) but I also cannot stand the idea of wasting minutes of my life navigating to the second screen to open my apps. I might try jailbreaking my iPhone again in the future to replace the icons, but for now I can’t be bothered with the hassle of going through the onerous process.

The obvious: Messages, Phone, Mail, Safari, App Store, Camera, Calendar, Maps, Clock, Settings, Notes. I consider these absolutely essential as basic functions of the device, and remain in their original spot. Youtube is there by virtue of my subscriptions: I follow great insightful videos from some people that are great to watch on the iPhone when I am on the go.

LiveView is essential in previewing iPhone UI and icon designs – I use it daily. While the icon is offensively ugly and makes about as much sense as using a banana icon for a Stocks application, the app is fantastic. I’d recommend it to anyone working on iPhone designs.

Things is the cornerstone of my workflow, and lets me stay on top of the tasks I have daily to meet deadlines. It’s the epitaph of simplicity and elegancy, which is what I love about it. It’s also entirely compatible with the way I store my to-do lists mentally. Also notable for having an astonishingly well-designed icon. I have a shirt with the (simplified) icon on it, which I wear with pride.

I’m the designer of Warships, an iPhone game by Edovia, and as such I have it on my home screen for extensive play-testing. It’s really fun, which certainly helps. The icon is a work in progress. Before Warships, the excellent Ramp Champ game by the Iconfactory graced my home screen.

Ego aggregates my website, blog, Twitter, Feedburner and Vimeo stats. I love it. It’s seated firmly next to Mint, and together form the best website stats you can have on your iPhone.

Twitter apps are a hot topic, and in my iPhone home screen history it’s been stormy as well. I used to use Twitterrific, moved to Tweetie, then moved to Birdfeed and recently started using Tweetie 2, thanks to its snappiness and landscape mode. Its refresh gesture is also quite addictive. Horrid icon, though, particularly in the Dock. I have to keep it in the Dock because I can tap it easily; I check on Twitter a lot, and again, functionality takes first place.

Off-screen but oft used: iReddit, to read the superior user-powered news website with a good dose of humor, the aforementioned Ramp Champ, a few iPhone app betas, Deliveries, Junecloud’s phenomenally designed package tracker, iStat to check on my old Macbook Pro turned server and Mac Pro desktop, and BeeJive IM for push chatting when I need it.

I have the double-home button press set to the Camera, but I can’t say I use it often.