September 22, 2017

New Icon

The app icon is a fundamental part of any app. I personally judge apps by their icons and I am very comfortable admitting that. The icon is a reflection of lots of things, including quality, beauty, innovation, platform nativeness, and even the developer’s values. All of this is visible from the very first glimpse. It’s incredibly rare for an app with a beautiful icon to be crap. Even more, app icons are of utmost importance in macOS, since we, Mac users, care a lot about how our apps look and feel.

Pixelmator has always had a beautiful icon. It was important to us from the very beginning, so we took great care in designing it. And that hasn’t changed now with the upcoming Pixelmator Pro. In fact, Pixelmator Pro has the most beautiful icon we’ve ever made. It says exactly what we want it to say — Pixelmator Pro is a creative Mac app that has a lot to do with photos.

The fact that the Pixelmator Pro icon is inspired by Photos is not a coincidence. We want you to know exactly that — this is a native Mac app that extends the Photos app on your Mac with awesome creative tools. That’s what brush in the icon says. And the thick rounded board means that it’s a huge standalone app, not some piece of utility software. The modified flower from the Photos icon represents a manipulated or edited photo, which is what Pixelmator Pro is all about.

Previous Icon

Even though the Pixelmator Pro icon is beautiful and incredibly meaningful — we are going to change it.

In our initial app testing, we’ve run into a problem with the icon where we sometimes launched the Photos app instead of Pixelmator Pro and vice versa. Especially if the macOS Dock was too small. That is not OK. Another thing is that, when creating the icon for Pixelmator Pro for iPad, we looked for full icon consistency between both macOS and iOS. So we tried to use the same flower shape. But that looked even closer to the Photos app on iOS — not OK even more.

So we went out to try to come up with something new. We did it — and it turned out to be amazing. The new Pixelmator Pro icon clearly shows that this is a creative, expressive, and very Mac app.

New Icon

It channels creativity using all the colors of the color spectrum in an expressive, partly abstract design. It also features our signature brush and the 9º rotation that appears in many default macOS app icons. It’s instantly recognizable. And we’ve designed it to delight you from the very first moment you download Pixelmator Pro. I think you and your Mac are going to love it.

Be sure to let us know what you think about the new icon. We are updating the Pixelmator Pro app, our website, and all of our product and marketing materials while you read this. It should all be ready for you to enjoy very soon at www.pixelmator.com.

Stay tuned.