Talking App Icons on the Postlight Podcast

I enjoy the Postlight Podcast. So much, in fact, I’ve documented some of my favorite excerpts here on the blog (and I’ve got another draft of favorite excerpts queued up for another day).

I also enjoy talking about app icon design to whoever will listen.

So you can imagine the joy it was to have those two interests intersect when I appeared on The Postlight Podcast Episode #314: (Icon)ic Design.

On it, Michael and I talk with the lovely Chappell Ellison and Nathan Burge at Postlight about the history, craft, and culture of app icon design.

We also touch on how creating The App Icon Book is an act of trying to preserve artifacts from a fleeting digital medium, something that borders on being an act of translation more than it does mere reproduction. Here’s me:

[Trying to preserve app icons in a book is] an interesting task because so much of app icon design is a digitally native medium, right? And so when you move it to print, it’s a [form] of translation that we have to make choices in. The color space, for example, is RGB and now we’ve got to do CMYK. How’s that gonna work out in the translation—[what will change and what will be lost?]

Find links to the podcast for your podcatcher of choice, as well as the transcript, over on Postlight.com.