Reveal Icon
With Big Sur, Apple introduced new, rounded icons for macOS. The team at Reveal reimagined the iconic chatterbox icon in Blender, using custom lighting and hand-painted textures for a Pixar-like look. The result is a refreshed icon that stays true to Reveal’s brand and fits seamlessly with Apple’s updated design.
type
Icon Design
company
Itty Bitty Apps
released
2020
Team
Tony Arnold, Sean Woodhouse
As a part of the Big Sur release, Apple announced a new suite of app icons for the Mac. The new set is now more consistent with iOS, and takes on its rounded, “squircle” icon shape. The only distinction they’ve made to — “make it more Mac” — is an added layer of depth and dimension using gorgeous 3D-rendered objects that can extend beyond the edges of the base.
Conforming to this new style posed a hefty challenge for us with Reveal. Our iconic chatterbox had a unique silhouette, and it stood out against other icons on the dock. Shrinking it down to fit within the base wouldn’t have just diluted the impact of our icon, but seemed like an easy way out. And so, much like our revamped interface, we used this opportunity to explore a new design.
What is Reveal? How do we distill such an abstract concept into a simple illustration? Should we start from scratch, and throw away a much-beloved and recognised logo? — These were the questions we discussed over and over, deep within many threads across the whole Itty Bitty Apps team.
We explored a few directions and tried to resurrect older ideas — but in the end, decided to go all-in on the chatterbox. This meant that our next challenge was to figure out how to take our existing brand, and make it appear like it belongs next to Apple’s own apps. Eventually, the approach we landed on was to re-draw the chatterbox in 3D.
Many hours were spent modelling an origami chatterbox in Blender. Although tedious upfront, modelling in 3D made it easier to compose the final scene. The chatterbox could be rotated and moved; the lighting could be adjusted; and the virtual camera’s settings could be set up on the fly. All it takes is a bit of set up, the push of a button, then a few minutes of rendering, until we get a couple of potential variations of the chatterbox in 3D.
Once the model was set up, it then came down to the styling. The lighting was set to give the chatterbox its recognisable shadows and sharp lines. Within the scene, the chatterbox was then placed on a platform to bounce the light and provide a subtle reflection under the model. And finally, the textures on the chatterbox were manually hand-painted with a digital, watercolour brush (our goal was to make it look like it came straight out of a Pixar film).
And that's the end result. Our iconic chatterbox, re-modelled and re-textured in 3D — while staying true to the iterations before it.