Comments on: App Icons are Itty Bitty Banner Ads

By: Jennifer Powell

Jennifer Powell — Sun, 09 May 2010 10:08:22 +0000

Flicker is really great when sharing photos over friends and families. I love the resize feature of Flickr.,*-

By: Livija Crosswell

Livija Crosswell — Fri, 07 May 2010 11:13:32 +0000

We might as well come out say it, we don’t like “banner ads” that much. Then again, its not like we have a fondness for billboards on the side of the highway either. Its just that sometimes they can get in our way as a pop up advertisement, or slow down a web page. In the world of banner advertisements, most people suffer from “banner blindness,” which means we can basically see an ad flickering below and ignore it.

By: InTheUnion

InTheUnion — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:40:39 +0000

I’ve been thinking for a while that the iPhone home screen looks a lot like the album cover from the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night”. Just a fun possibility really…

http://fantasmavelez.com/blog/the-beatles-a-hard-days-night_big.jpg

After all, Steve Jobs is a Beatles fan.

By: T. Benjamin Larsen

T. Benjamin Larsen — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:00:40 +0000

Great article. Unfortunately, looking through some of the banner-ads on T.A. these days it seems some developers don’t even treat their banner-ads like banner-ads. Meaning: They seem to spend months perfecting their games and when they’re finished they spend 20 minutes throwing something together with whatever artwork they have laying around. OK, a bit harsh I admit, but it saddens me when developers don’t respect their own apps enough to make a decent ad. :/

By: LeftRight Studios » Icons are the face of your iPhone apps

LeftRight Studios » Icons are the face of your iPhone apps — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 06:49:32 +0000

[...] user to take that one extra step of tapping your app inside the appstore. Arnold from TouchArcade has blogged about the importance of your app icon, he calls it the Banner Ads for you application and I 100% [...]

By: Vinny

Vinny — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 06:37:20 +0000

Great article! Screen shots are another area that I think developers overlook too often. It doesn’t matter how great a game is if you can’t get it noticed…icons and screen shots are what give people a first impression, so devs really need to make those count!

By: Peter Hartwig

Peter Hartwig — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 06:40:04 +0000

This was a really interesting read. Thanks!

I guess the overall quality of iPhone Apps is getting better, and users are expecting more and more, hence we cannot get away with not doing things right. It is actually quite nice that the bars are being raised, as we went from the app store being blue ocean, to a more murky red ocean market.

Thanks again,

Peter Hartwig
peterhartwig.wordpress.com

By: Nijel

Nijel — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 07:21:01 +0000

Excellent observation. i absolutely agree with you. when I’m browsing the app store good icons always get my attention, and bad ones kinda signal “hey, we don’t care about our application at all, that’s why we have an ugly icon. check us out” = AVOID.

your icon is your app as a cover is to a book. it’s really not accurate to judge a book by it’s cover, but most people do it anyway.

By: Dang

Dang — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:44:38 +0000

When I’m browsing through the App Store I am looking at the most attractive Icons. They usually catch my attention and lead me to clicking on it to see more. The second part is the screen shots.

Pocket God always updates their icons on every new update. That is the method that we are approaching also.

It’s all about presentation!

By: Jon Myers

Jon Myers — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:35:39 +0000

Agreed. I likened the App Icon to the album cover. It’s an important detail that we took really serious for our soon to be released game.

We used two different methods for testing different treatments for our App Icon. One we used Facebook ads with targeted keywords and measured CTRs. Once we had some design clarity and further data/ direction we used Twitter as a quick means to get instant feedback on the App Icon.

Oddly enough our initial instincts on the App Icon were dead wrong. The testing, transparency and real-time feedback were a crucial piece to the process and helped us get what we believe is an Icon that best represents our game.