Well, I’ve started to have a think about my own little project on mobile interfaces. This is quite a task - I’m no interface designer, and already I can see that this is a well examined subject with probably some pretty concrete solutions already.

What I’m debating over with myself at the moment is whether to investigate the actual iconography that could potentially be used within the OS of a phone, or the physical menu structure that is used within the phone and how to make that more appealing.

I have an N73 as my current phone, and my used theme is currently this:

… Psiloc Redium. I was amazed when I saw this because there are so many horrible themes for Symbian based phones that not only look garish, but slow the phone down a lot. The main reason I use this theme is to keep my phone running well, as it’s vector based.

But… (and there is a but), the icons are pretty non-descript. I tend to find myself reading the text next to the icon rather than looking at the actual icon to find my way around - in fact thinking about it now, if someone asked me to draw the icon for ’settings’ there’s no way I could do it. Iconography for phones is stereotypically very samey, nothing stands out for me here.

My initial thought is to try and create something in between the glossy drop-shadowed world of the iPhone and the solid, stereotypical, helvetica man icons. I’m also going to try and get some funtionality in there, or some kind of visual device that shows progression of menus so you instantly know where you are in the menu system of the phone with one glance. If I could create some kind of visual reference for a tree-structure style menu in the icon, that would be great.

I’m going to carry on scribbling and thinking, but this is my first blog-rambling to get my thoughts in sync.