Full Transcript for 97: Icon and Visual Designer – Matthew Skiles

you got to this point, I always kick off the show the same way to introduce people to who you are before we get to your work itself. So the three questions I always do to kick things off is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then let's talk about your career that led up to this sort of fantastic icon design studio you have now. Matthew Skiles: Yep. So I'm based in New Zealand, South Island of New Zealand. I was born in Canada, but I've spent pretty much my whole life down this end of the world. So I guess you would say I'm a New Zealander. Some of them don't believe that. Kiwi? Yeah. When they hear my accent, they say, "You're not from here," but I am. On the inside, I feel like a Kiwi. But yeah, so I'm a Kiwi-based graphic designer. I have no formal education at all when it comes to graphic design. I started designing things when I was, what was I? I was 15 is when I designed my first website and coded it for a tennis coach. My father knew I was tennis coach, and he said, "I need a website for teaching kids how to do tennis." And my father said, "Hey, maybe my kids could do that." So my brother and I were like, "Maybe we could do that. We got a book on how to build your first website in HTML." Charlie Chapman: So you hadn't even done anything with HTML before that? Matthew Skiles: No, no. Hadn't done a single thing. We got a book and we were like, "This doesn't seem that hard." It took us a long time, but we built something and it was totally passable. He didn't need a whole lot. He kind of really just needed one page to sell what he was offering. And yeah, we put that together. And I guess I liked the design side of it, so much more than the coding side. I didn't know it at the time, but I was kind of just more interested in that. I really liked CSS. Now you could change colors, you could make it more fun in different ways. And that was what started me on my digital journey of making pretty things. I just liked the feeling of being able to. There was nothing there and somebody wants something and you can put some stuff together and now you've got something that didn't exist not long Charlie Chapman: Before. And how did you go from that to being a capital D designer then? Matthew Skiles: I spent quite a few years in my teenage years just making small websites for people, family, friends, and people my parents knew and things, and I'd do that occasionally. It wasn't like a job so much as maybe once or twice a year somebody would have something. I'd be like, "Oh yeah, I can do that." And it was a pretty slow-going process, I guess, for quite a while. And then I just kept making things. I liked designing things, so I started doing it on my own time. When Dribble started, that was just an amazing thing to just look at. I wasn't a member yet because it was an invite only thing, so I would just marvel at all the cool stuff that other people made. And I kept designing stuff opening one day I could get an

invite to do that, and eventually I did. And then yeah, I just kept designing things for myself primarily. I'm on a few small projects on the side. Until that slowly, I guess I built a little bit of a reputation for myself on the internet, primarily on Dribble at that time. And I started getting a few more jobs and a few more jobs. At that time, it was still generally web-based stuff that I was doing, a few apps and stuff. And then I designed a little iOS, I guess it was called iOS back then. It was an iPhone game for, we called it Rock and Rockets. You had the little base on the ground and then you had to shoot rockets up at the aliens that were flying over. So my brother did the coding for that and I did all the design for that. We had probably like seven, eight levels where you're on a boat or at the pyramids or different things. And I got to do all the art for that, the menus and everything. And that was kind of a fun little side project. We never made games after that, but it was really fun to just see what it's like to be in that world. Charlie Chapman: And you got it released on the App Store? Yeah. Matthew Skiles: Yeah. We were on the App Store and everything probably close to 20, 15 years ago and probably something like that. It was a long time ago now. Charlie Chapman: That probably would've been your first app icon. Matthew Skiles: Yeah. Yeah, I think it actually was. Yeah. Yeah, for our own project. Yeah. I Charlie Chapman: Want to see it now. Is it visible anywhere? Matthew Skiles: Yeah, if you go to MacStories, MacStories has two. So we got two little articles published on it for Rock N Rockets. So if you search Rocken with an N, Rocken Rockets. Charlie Chapman: How did that go then? This was you actually making the product, right? Matthew Skiles: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was a slow process, I guess, because it was just me and my brother. We were pretty young at the time. We were probably 20 or so, and we just did it in our spare time as a fun little side thing. So we probably put it together over maybe six months, a year. It wasn't a huge game, but it was just a fun project to work on together. And yeah, we launched. It wasn't a big success. We weren't great marketers of the things, but we had some downloads. It was a fun process just to make something, to put it out in the world and to have a few people play it. We probably had probably a hundred people maybe who played it. It wasn't a huge success at all, but it was a fun process to just be a part of that world. Especially at that time, I loved video games, so did my brother. So it was just cool to be like, "We're making our own video game." We always wanted to make games since we were kids, so it was an experience worth doing for sure. Charlie Chapman: Not only was it you got to be part of the game world, but you also were then part of the sort of iOS indie game world if you were on MacStories. Was that a community you were already part of? Matthew Skiles: No, no, that was

the first time that I got to do that. I guess I was outside observing cool stuff like that. There were pixel art games, very retro styled games at that time. And I guess I was a really big fan of that type of art being made into games on iOS. And that was kind of an inspiration, I guess, is to make a little more retro looking games and bring them to the mobile space. Yeah, it was fun to be a part of that. You're looking up to all these people and you're like, "We're making one. It's nowhere near as cool, but we're doing something. We're trying to imitate that style." Charlie Chapman: So coming out of that, and even before that, I guess, all this time you were doing essentially consulting work, like building stuff for clients? Matthew Skiles: Yes. Yeah. At that time, yeah, I was doing it already. Yeah, mainly web stuff at that time, just web designs. I was doing WordPress builds as well, so I'd design it and then build out the WordPress website for them. And yeah, for the next couple of years, I probably still kept doing that. It wasn't till around, I looked it up yesterday. No, I'm trying to think. It was about 2014 maybe that I started doing app icons. I made a couple of ones for a few apps that were, I would say they're all right. I looked at them yesterday and I was like, "They're not too bad for being so long ago and I was so new to it." Charlie Chapman: And those just came up organically? People who knew your web work were like, "Hey, can you make me an icon?" Matthew Skiles: Yeah, I'm trying to think. One of them was for an app, a music related app that I did the web work for that for a couple of years before that, and then he decided to build an iOS app, so then I got the opportunity to do that. That's how I first got my initial app icon work was people I already knew from other projects and they were like, "We need this. You're the designer that we work with, so you can have that job." And I was very lucky in that way because I guess I didn't have the portfolio of any kind to show anyone that I can do app icons, but they knew my work already and they had enough faith in me to give it a shot. Charlie Chapman: And what was your approach coming into that? I mean, this is during an era where I feel like, well, maybe this isn't true, but it feels like during that era, the app icon designer thing was kind of becoming a big thing. And there was a lot of respect given to that as an art form in its own right in a way that feels a little different than now. Matthew Skiles: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And I would say those people became my heroes, the people who were making app icons at that time. It was probably a couple of years into designing that initially I was just working on a PC and I became aware of them that people were making cool Mac apps. And there was things like AppZapper and Disco and Panix apps like Coda and Transmit. And they just had such cool app icons. And that became something that I was just like, "People make these. There's

somebody who gets to design these as a job and they're so realistic and they're so full of details that just became, I guess, a fixation of, I don't know how to do that, but I hope one day I could make something half as good as these things that I see on other people's screens." And it just called to me that I want to look at these things. I want to make them. I want to make things that you can touch and just play with. Charlie Chapman: And so when you got your first opportunities to do that, what was your approach and what was the icon world like? Was this pre-iOS seven? Matthew Skiles: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it was pre-IS7. So yeah, one of my first app icons, it's actually in the app icon book. It's a little pocket. So it's like a little leather pocket, stitched leather, and it has little app icons inside of it, like a music player. And I can't remember what the other ones are. There's three little icons in it. But yeah, I was very much into the textures and detailed things and trying to capture realism. I guess again, that's what I saw in things like transmits truck icon or the leaf of realistic things. So my goal was to try to take it from, I guess I was doing very unrealistic designs before that, I guess, or just things that are flatter symbols or things that just don't quite have that. They look like a real object. But in that era, real objects were the cool thing to do in-app icons, especially. I've spent the rest of my career trying to make that cool again and I think it's coming back. Charlie Chapman: It certainly feels like it. Yeah, we'll get into that. So in this era, it was all what? We're using Photoshop for everything? Matthew Skiles: Yes. Yeah. Photoshop for. For the first few years it was only Photoshop. Eventually I got a hang of Illustrator and I found that I could do much more complex shapes and better groundwork. I build it in Illustrator and then bring it to Photoshop. But yeah, for the first few years it's Charlie Chapman: Photoshop. So you're texturing and finishing. Matthew Skiles: Yes, Charlie Chapman: Yes, yes, yes. You live in this a lot more than me. I always just dabbled as an extreme amateur. But I think of using Photoshop and Illustrator in that workflow as being like, "Oh, remember when we used to have to do that?" But then whenever I think about how would I do the same thing I did then, I'm like, "Wait, I don't actually know how I would do that. I think I would go back to Illustrator and Photoshop, but nobody seems to use those anymore." Matthew Skiles: I hear that a lot. I hear people always saying, "Those apps are dead. We don't use them anymore." And as a designer of specific things that you just can't really do in other apps, I don't quite see that. For me, I'm like, "There's no better tool for building textured things than Photoshop. I can manipulate layers. I can put gradient maps on them. I can do much more complex masks. I can do all sorts of things that I just can't do in any other app." And for less textured, less detailed apps, map icons, it's so much faster to do that in something like Sketch or Figma. But when you do want to do something heavily detailed or more complex, especially if you want to be precise with your shapes and alignment and everything, there is no other tool that replicates what those two can do. Charlie Chapman: So do you still finish in Photoshop most of the time? Matthew Skiles: I would say it's probably more often sketch these days, but I'm still using Photoshop. If I need any texture, I'm usually building it or warping it in Photoshop first. And pretty much everything, I'm building the initial shapes and the Illustrator first. It's just faster to build complex shapes for me than any other tool. Sometimes it's Figma depending on what somebody needs, but Sketch is my preference. I like Native apps. I like Sketch. Yeah. Charlie Chapman: I feel like I never was able to get a handle on Illustrator. I mean, I used it a lot, but it was never one where I felt I just was constantly running into weird walls of what am I supposed to do? I know exactly what I need to happen, but I don't know how to get there because it's just very esoteric. Matthew Skiles: It is. It's a very complicated app to learn. I was the same for a very long time. I would see other designers make things in Illustrator. I'm like, "I should be using that. That is so cool." And it's so complex. It's so hard to figure out Illustrator. But it took me what to me felt like way longer than it should have to eventually get there. But it's good to hear that other people also feel like it's so complex. Charlie Chapman: So getting back to your story then, at this point, it's not the delicious era, I guess, but it's still in that same continuum before the great flattening of iOS seven. And you kind of got to start doing some icons, but that wasn't your primary work. Matthew Skiles: Yeah. No, not at all. Charlie Chapman: And then iOS seven happened. And I keep referencing that, assuming everybody knows what I'm talking about. But the big iOS seven moment was living in that world, I was actually an Android user and a Big Mac person. I was the weird inverted person that turned out during that time period. But iOS felt super dated to me as an outside person because of how dark and overly textured it felt like everything was. And this was the big Johnny I of Make the World White Room kind of moment. And icons in particular, I don't want to say suffered because that leads the witness a little bit, but certainly there was a massive change from highly textured, highly detailed, realistic renderings to way flatter than you even look at when you look at your icons today. So I'm just really curious what your lived experience of that announcement and then what came out of all that was. Matthew Skiles: Yeah. For me, much more as user of that world and being inside of it, I would say I didn't notice how dark they are. It wasn't until much later. And when I look back now,

I'm like, "Whoa, it was so dark the way that they were doing everything then." But I didn't notice it at the time. I wasn't an Android user. So it was a big. Yeah, I almost felt the opposite. I was like, "Why is it everything so colorful and so bright?" And to me, that seems crazy now that I love that style of things to be bright and colorful. And you can see that in my work, but it wasn't apparent to me at the time. I was like, "What are we doing? What is all this color? It's so childish. It's so not serious," but it was a different time. I felt differently. Charlie Chapman: And I guess you weren't actively rolling through doing app icons at that time. It was still the occasional thing? Matthew Skiles: Yeah, it was probably two or three a year at that point. It wasn't a whole lot. Yeah, just occasionally when somebody that I worked with needed one, or in a rare case, somebody who saw one of my previous ones that I had posted would come along. Charlie Chapman: Were you holding the line when those did come up and being like, "Let's add some detail," or were you kind of like, "Let's make this fit with the system and begrudgingly make everything flat?" Matthew Skiles: Yeah, I think I was pretty quick to jump on board with we'll go flat. And it seemed like that's what everyone was wanting to do. Anybody who came to me was like, "We need a new flat icon." So yeah, I just jumped on board. I guess I would've said it was actually, it almost felt more complicated because before that you had details and textures to hide behind. And then because of the great flattening, you just had to have a great shape. And I was so new to it that it felt quite daunting and you're like, "I have to get this shape to be amazing if I want this app icon to stand out. I can't just hide it under coolness of textures and other things." Charlie Chapman: It is kind of like Favacon. Whenever you are doing a brand icon or logo mark or whatever, and you have to make it work at Favacon sizes as well as larger sizes, it's like, wow, this limitation, how do I make it visually distinctive with just color or silhouette? Matthew Skiles: Yeah. Yeah. So I think it was great for that to come along at that time in my career for me to learn that that's something important and that's how to focus on that first of get a good shape going first before you added details and textures. So it was beneficial despite it being a difficult period at that time because you're like, "I don't know how to do this. I just know how to put textures on things." Charlie Chapman: And maybe to pull on that thread a little more and jump ahead in the story slightly is the next great Apple bequeathing on us, a world that we all have to live in now is the icon jail moment of the Mac. Now, I don't know that you've done that. Maybe you have done a lot of Mac icons, but it seems like most of the work I see from you is on the iOS side. But for context for everybody else, on the Mac, this delicious era of Mac icons that

you were talking about at the beginning, part of what made it so great is they were free. You had a big transparent box. You can make it any shape you want. You can make it a squirkle, but then have stuff break out of it. And then last year with Tahoe, yeah, they said, "Nope, no more. Every app has to live inside a Squirkle jail." And we talked about the challenge of you only can rely on a silhouette. Well, once that happened, you didn't even really have a silhouette. You now are going to be in a box and you had even more limitations. So what were your feelings on that? Matthew Skiles: I would say when they first brought the scorkel, but you could still break out of the bounds of that, I actually really liked that constraint because there's a lot of fun designs you can do where there's a little piece of it sticking out of it or the top is different than the bottom. Yeah, it's a nice constraint to work with, I found. I actually enjoyed iPicons a little more, even though I think I would agree prior to that there is more distinct silhouettes if they don't all fit into the Squirkle. But from a design perspective, it's quite a fun constraint to work with. But the Tahoe constraint where you can't break those bounds when you want to, I'm not the biggest fan of. I think it's too much of a constraint, but I liked the middle ground just before that. I feel like I made some of my favorite MacApp icons were once that transition happened where you could build a box and fit that box into it, but then say have the lid open and it extends just a little bit past the edges. And I really like that finding that how can we make this real object fit into this shape, but with a bit of freedom just to add a bit of flare and fun to it. Charlie Chapman: I liked that the Big Sur moment was when they basically changed the icons by convention, but not by technology. Anybody could, and Apple or Adobe still would just make theirs big squares, but most of the icons would fit into this same looking squirkle as you get on iOS, but you're allowed to break out. And I felt like that was maybe the most fun time in those designs. Matthew Skiles: Definitely I would agree as well. And yeah, I guess it's an advised constraint versus a forced constraint I think gives the best results for something. The forced glass look for everything. Charlie Chapman: I won't fast-forward too much further, but I guess the last thing on this little journey here is, and this came with Tahoe as well, but this year it's kind of continuing that trend, which is not only are we inside of the system where you're stuck inside of this box, but for the most part, icons are no longer expected to just be rasterized pixels, but instead to be defined vector shapes that can be rendered with effects by the system itself, which means they can look different in different contexts based on the system making changes. How have you felt about that whole change? Is that a fun thing to play with or is it more frustrating? Matthew Skiles: I would say it leans more frustrating, but there are fun bits of that. I guess when it comes to, if there is a specific icon you're working on that it makes sense to have it be glassy or it makes sense to have a unified app icon across, say, Watch OS and MacOS and iOS, then it's great. Icon Composer is great for that. It's easy to build out an app icon that works on all. I don't have to do different designs for different platforms and everything. So that I really appreciate. But there are so many times when it just doesn't make sense for there to be a glass highlight on the corners of this object that somebody wants to have for their app icon, and you just have to live with that's just how it's going to look. And yeah, I would say more frustration than positive, but there are some positives that I'm appreciative of what they built because it saves time, it saves energy, and it can give you results that are totally system-like without too much effort to build something that someone wants to be, especially if they want to be very system-like, it can be quite easy to replicate that with the tools that they give us with Icon Composer. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, I guess the big hangup there is because you can choose whether or not you want to use their effects on layers within your icon, but you can't turn off the edge highlights themselves that place your icon in kind of a glass context. Matthew Skiles: Yes, yes. And I get it because it creates consistency in your doc or on your home screen. But yeah, if it was up to me, that effect wouldn't exist. Let people put glass within the icon, but just don't put it on the frame because then if you don't want a glassy icon, you don't have to go that route. But this is the world we live in. We accept what Apple gives us and we find a way to make it work. Charlie Chapman: We'll roll back here. So we left off, iOS seven happened. You are doing occasional icons, but this is not your main beat. But if we look at 2026 Matthew Skiles, at least externally, maybe this isn't the case for you day-to-day, it feels like you're the app icon person. That is your main portfolio piece. That's what people are asking you for all the time. How did that start? Matthew Skiles: I just kept making them is what it is. When I would get a chance, that's what I would post. I wouldn't post my web design work. I would just post App Icon Designs. Charlie Chapman: And post means where? Matthew Skiles: Dripple was the main place I was doing that. Eventually I started doing it on Twitter, formerly known as Twitter. And yeah, those kind of became the main places. Now I do a Mastodon in Blue Sky as well, but the places when I started getting more jobs was primarily Dripple and then eventually Twitter as well of just posting when I made an app icon and just trying to show people this is what I like to do. This is what I hope I'm good at at the time. I was like, "I think this is pretty. I think I did a good job. You could hire

me to do another one if you want." And I just kept doing that. And eventually, I guess I got the ball rolling a bit that people started seeing that's the guy who did something we could hire in for that. But I think the big thing that really got me noticed in that world was when Christian came along with Apollo and asked me to do some alternates for that. That was a really big. He has such a huge audience and it's such a big thing in the community, the app icons for that app. So it was really beneficial for people to see my work and just be like, "Oh, I like what he did in the app. I want the same guy who did the app icon in Apollo to do something for me." That was a really a helpful thing for me in getting popularity enough for people to see what I did because I guess I didn't have a huge following before that, but his app has a huge following. So it doesn't hurt to get asked by Christian to make something for his app. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, seriously. And for reference, Apollo, rest in peace, was the iOS indie iOS Reddit app. And Christian did a really cool thing. Honestly, I feel like he did a just big thing for the art of icon design by. One of his features for the pro version of Apollo was you get access to a constantly updating set of app icons. And he would bring in basically everybody I know about that's well-known for icon design. He got them at some point, commissioned them to make icons. But inside of the app, it's like an art piece. It says your name, it says who it's from. That's almost like a big part of what the appeal was, right? Matthew Skiles: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it was. I was truly honored that he asked me to be a part of it because there was so many great designers who had already made app icons before I got a chance to do it. I was like, "Do you want me to make an app icon with this? I hope I can live up to your expectations." Luckily he kept asking me back. I got to do a few more after that, so I must have done an all right job. Charlie Chapman: At that point, you said you were constantly posting this. I'm assuming that's because that's the work you really liked doing and you wanted to do more of this. Matthew Skiles: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Charlie Chapman: How did you think about that in terms of the business of running a design consultancy? Because I feel like app icons are very short-term engagements without a lot of repeat work. That would terrify me as somebody who I would be stressed about constant work coming in. Matthew Skiles: If I was a smart businessman, I wouldn't have made that decision, but I make decisions based on it's fun. I like these things. These are what I love to do, and it makes me happy to get to work on these things. And luckily life worked out, but people keep wanting me to make things for them. But yeah, it was not a smart business decision. I'm still not sure if it's a smart business decision, but it keeps working, so I'll keep doing it. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, yeah. Write it out as long as you can.

Matthew Skiles: Exactly. Charlie Chapman: It's one of those things where, like many things with the app store, I think it's easy to forget the scale of just how big it is. And usually when I say that, I'm meaning in terms of just people opening the app store and searching to solve their problem. When I'm talking to developers and you're talking about distribution, it's hard to overestimate how many people are hitting that box. And if you can just ladle a small amount with a good keyword or a good solution to somebody's problem, it can be surprisingly big numbers for a smaller developer. But I assume that's also the case on the app developer side. There's so many people making apps. Matthew Skiles: It continually surprises me because yeah, I always think I've made so many over my career. How can there be more apps and more people that I haven't worked with? But there's always a new person who comes along and says, "I've got a new app and I want you to make an app icon." And I guess I am very grateful for Apple for having the app store and making it such a thing in the world that there are developers who make apps Because yeah, I have my career because it's a possibility for people to make apps and they need app icons to do that. And I get to work on them every day, something that I love, but this wasn't a job when I was a kid. There wasn't that many app developers, so this wasn't something you could dream of one day doing. Charlie Chapman: Yeah. And I think there is something to, I could be wrong on this, but I think there's something to the fact that the cards landed where they landed with Apple being the one running this thing, I think does mean that you're allowed to and expected to have a little bit more attention to detail and care about the art form of the icon. Whereas it's not that there wouldn't need to be designers, but the needs and goals would definitely be different on a different platform. Matthew Skiles: Yes, yes. No, they would for sure. And I guess that's what I love about app icons in the Apple ecosystem, especially in their funner eras, let's say, when they don't have squirkle jails and things. There is a prioritization of making fun, well-designed app icons. And it used to be apps as well. We don't quite see that as much, the app interfaces having that same sort of character and fun to them, but maybe one day we'll get that back too. But that definitely was a big part of it, I think, is Apple fostering that sort of commitment from developers to want to have great looking apps and great looking app icons for their product. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, I feel like the apps themselves have had almost an opposite world where it became so much more complicated, the amount of different things you have to think about in terms of screen sizes and all these different platforms and everything's cross-platform now that it requires so much more investment to do something custom and interesting and have texture and that kind of thing. Well,

I guess that's kind of true with app icons because of what we were talking about, the effects that are laid on top and stuff, but a little less so. It's mostly convention is why things have moved flatter, right? Matthew Skiles: We can still ship an app icon and I can drop a PNG file in there and we'll only have the glass around the edge, but we don't have to do anything different otherwise, and we could use that on any platform we wanted to. So yeah, there isn't a complete constraint to do that the same as there is with developing apps or even for the web, I guess it got a lot harder when we had all the different screen sizes you had to work for. Some of that fun didn't go away in certain ways because it's just too complex to make it work for every different use case. Charlie Chapman: And we were talking about Apple and their care for design and how that shaped the app icons. Android doesn't have these same constraints on app icons. It is actually more like the Mac where you can just have transparency. Do you do a lot of Android icons? And if you do, what's that like? Matthew Skiles: I really don't. I guess it's because that's not the type of work that I show off, so no one comes to me thinking that I can do that. I usually only will do that if someone has an app that's also on Android, then we'll do the app icon for iOS and then usually it'll be a variant of that that fits within the guidelines and constraints of the Android platform. But yeah, it's pretty rare. I've probably, maybe once a year, someone will need one on Android. But yeah, just the developer community that I exist in, I guess, is probably really made up of Apple developers. So they're the ones who see my work and they're the ones who come to me. So I'm not sure where the Android developer community probably exists somewhere, but I'm just not quite a part of that. So I don't see them and they don't see me, so we don't have much crossover. Charlie Chapman: As I've done many times, I think on the show, calling out to the listeners, I'm always looking for people in that Android space. I feel like I do know of indie Android community folks, but it's definitely more on the open source or these kind of more feature rich, like a utility client that has a million options, but it's less about the kind of design. And it's not to say that Android apps don't have interesting and good designs and Android itself is an interestingly designed operating system, but I at least have never been able to find that community of people the same way. Matthew Skiles: Yeah, same here. I often think that of I don't see the designers who are making the app icons for Android, but there's so many apps on Android, so there's got to be somebody somewhere posting the work. But again, they don't seem to exist in the same communities as the Apple developers. So I don't see them and I wish I did because I'm sure that there's so many things I'm missing out on that I could see, I could appreciate. I could follow people and say, "This is great work, but I just don't know who they are and I don't know how to find most people." But something Apple has kind of built, I guess, is a community in that way for their developers. The way they run their system, people around that build communities that you can gather together and share ideas. Charlie Chapman: Obviously, Apple deserves credit in the sense of fostering this philosophy of caring about design and everything. But the community itself has always seemed like it existed in its own right. And you mentioned Dribble earlier, and Dribble, I think it's still around. It's Dribble like a basketball, but with three Bs. And yeah, 10, 15 years ago still even, I feel like Dribble was the designer hangout place. Matthew Skiles: It Charlie Chapman: Was, yes. Where you went to learn about the, what was it? Newmorphic? That's the last trend I remember on Dribble. It was. It was a Matthew Skiles: Thing for a time. Yeah. Charlie Chapman: But that was where people posted their interesting work they were doing, and that was where it felt like there was this sort of organic movement of ideas through the design community, the digital design community. And it doesn't feel like Dribble's that anymore, even if it is still around. And maybe it is, you can correct me if I'm wrong. Matthew Skiles: No, no, no, it definitely isn't. Yeah. The heyday has passed for that kind of space Charlie Chapman: For sure. And where is that? Is it Twitter/Mastodon/Bluesky/whatever today's latest social network is? Or is there somewhere I don't know about? Matthew Skiles: If there is somewhere, I don't know about it either. From my experience, yeah, it just kind of fell apart over time. It used to be Twitter for a time and I guess people went their different ways. Some people went to Macedon, some people just stopped posting over the years, and it isn't the same community as it once was. And I do miss that, and I think a lot of people do. I often see people wanting to recreate a new version of what Dribble used to be, but nothing seems to be able to recreate that. Charlie Chapman: It's hard to explain. If you weren't in the space and community in the early 2000s or 2010s, not 2000s, think of the way most people here probably know the AI community now, mostly Twitter. And the energy and freneticness and flame wars and all of the things that come with that, that existed maybe with less money and less people, but to the same kind of energy and degree in the design community and in the ion, honestly, app building community. And part of it was everything was new. And so everything was being invented/explored and we could do stupid things, but we didn't know they were stupid yet. And maybe that's really all it is, but it feels like maybe everything shifted to Twitter and then with Twitter getting the things happening to it that it happened with and everybody splitting off into different zones, it feels like that never reformed the same way.

Matthew Skiles: Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's kind of the, we could say complaint about the internet itself. It was a bit smaller feeling in the early days. There was a little bit of a different vibe and tone to the internet. And I guess as a whole, it's a different world now. It's more algorithmically driven. It's a different kind of communities exist generally speaking than what we had back then. Not necessarily bad now. They're just different, harder to find probably than they were, or at least harder to find bigger communities. They're probably smaller, more niche things and smaller groups in different places, but they seem to be a little more all in one place, I guess, back then. Charlie Chapman: So where are you looking for influence these days? How are you getting new ideas in and sharing your ideas out? Matthew Skiles: I would say it's still primarily X, formerly Twitter. Not so much Drivel these days. There's not a whole lot of activity there anymore. But yeah, it's primarily X is where I get it. But yeah, it's just not as much as it used to be, I would say. So you kind of have to go a little further out and just explore to try and find things that aren't all the same because otherwise there's just a lot of people making things that look like everybody else's stuff. You don't quite have that variety that you used to see, so it takes a little more work. But yeah, I don't think I could suggest any specific other place. Twitter X is still the primary place where I would get that inspiration, but I do long for more digital inspiration. Charlie Chapman: In the icon space, what are the current ideas or trends that you see happening now? Matthew Skiles: Yeah, I guess glass obviously, but I would think more interesting glass is something that I see happening at the moment. People doing their own shaders with glass or doing them in Blender or things that give you, I guess, more polished looking glass than defaultly what Icon Composer will give you. So just more complex designs that have complex refractions or more depth to them. There's a lot of interesting things I'm seeing people do with more complicated versions of glass. And that's probably the primary thing I'm seeing. I guess also just working with very. A lot of times they're shader-driven color mesh gradients and things like that. There's a lot of work I see in that area. I think that's something interesting to work into how app icons are done. At the moment, I see a lot of it and it's a little too abstract. They do kind of their, look, I made a colorful thing, but it doesn't quite show what the app is. And I think taking those ideas and maybe concretizing them a little bit so they have a little more of an object or a symbol that you're trying to portray something is an interesting path, but it hasn't quite settled. I guess it's just a new idea that people are playing with at the moment. Charlie Chapman: Based on that right there, something I really wanted to dig into a little bit here is

what is your philosophy around icon design? So taking out current trends, whenever somebody reaches out to you and they want to do an icon, I'm sure they give you ideas right off the bat or whatever, but what are you looking for at the beginning to be like, all right, what is the direction we want to take this? And then how do you sculpt that into a finished product at the end? Matthew Skiles: In an ideal scenario, someone has a good idea of what they're hoping to portray. I guess in my favorite times, someone will come to me and they say, "I want a flower that's coming out of a shoe," let's say. They have a very specific idea because they know that represents their app. You don't always get that lucky, but those are my favorite because I guess they know what they want and you can spend all of your time refining that and making that perfect. Charlie Chapman: And when it comes to that core concept, do you think it's better whenever those are directly reflections of something inside of the app? Matthew Skiles: No, no. Yeah, I don't think so at all. Yeah, I guess to go back to some earlier examples, I guess like Transmits Truck or Codas Leaf, there are app icons that it's so fun to have in your doc. People don't care what it is. They're just like, "I want to find out what that app is," and then that will draw them into using the app. So yeah, I would say for me, those are almost. My favorite is the ones that aren't too literal, but they're such a unique or fun design that people will be drawn in by that and they'll want to have it around even if they're like, "I don't know if I want to use this app. I don't know if I need it." But the app icon will make them be like, "I'll give it a shot because I want that in my doc. I want that on my home screen." So I guess that's my hope is to make app icons that are enticing and they're visually fun to look at so that they're not boring and you're like, "It's a utility I use. It doesn't need to look nicer." I think if it's a utility you use all the time, it should be something you like having around. You should like to look at it. I guess it's the same as if you have a tool and you could have a nice looking one or you could have one that looks terrible colors, you'd want to have a nice one sitting on your desk. You want to have a nice whatever type of tool it is, a nice pen, let's say. Charlie Chapman: And so step one is find that metaphor and then you can start racing on making that metaphor work. Do you start with shape colors? Do you have some kind of approach that you usually do for the beginning point? Matthew Skiles: See if you can see this here. So what I have is, this is what I've been doing recently. So I have these little half icon squares and I just put them here and I will just, there's a grid on it. You can't actually see it, but it has that half icon grid on it. So I will just draw lots of shapes if I have on here that has something on it I can show you. Charlie Chapman: So pencil and paper.

Matthew Skiles: Yeah, that's what I've been doing these days. I guess I used to do on a Procade or on my iPad or sometimes I do it different ways. But yeah, at the moment that's what I found. You get a little more organic shapes and things that are kind of. Sometimes it's easier to convey it with a sketch, a literal sketch versus if you just had some simpler lines in Illustrator, it might not quite have the same feel that you're going for with the final product. So yeah, I will do a bunch of sketches, usually probably 10 different ones if I can. Sometimes we sort of have an idea, so we don't need as many. We're like, "It's probably going to be this, we just want a few variants." But if it's a little more vague as to what we want, we'll probably sketch up a bunch of different directions. And then usually somebody would say, "This one works, this is the idea we want." And then I will start building basic shapes for that usually. I won't start with color yet unless sometimes they already have a preexisting brand or we're say refreshing an existing app. So we kind of know it's going to be these colors, but otherwise I'll generally avoid color until we get further on the path of this shape's going to work so then we can start adding colors and things to it. Charlie Chapman: And the important thing with a shape is obviously conveying whatever the concept is, but are you at this stage already thinking about distinctiveness and recognizability at different sizes and all that? Matthew Skiles: Yeah, most of the time there are some apps, I guess. Some apps will come to you and they have an idea and you're like, "This isn't going to be great at a super small size," but that's a downside they're willing to accept because this is the concept they want. It may be quite detailed and that's what they've wanted and it's not going to translate super well with a small size, but that's just how it is with some apps. They just have to accept that. But overall, if you have the freedom to start with a fresh idea yet, you're probably going to be starting with what ideas will be able to translate to all of the use cases here where you don't want to be making something you're like, "It looks great, they love it, but we can't actually make this work in an app icon for all the context." Charlie Chapman: And then when you get to the point of bringing in color, how do you think about color on the app store? Are you looking at competition and being like, "How do we separate from everybody else?" Or are you trying to stay agnostic of what the outside world is thinking? Matthew Skiles: Depends on the project. Some people are a little more into showing you the competition that they have and saying, "These people, everybody uses orange, so we don't want to use orange because that's what everyone in this space uses." So that can be useful to do that. But I guess I usually am a little more client-led in that way that some of them, they do want to fit with what most people are doing in the space because they want to be a similar product to the other ones in the space. So yeah, it's not so much up to me. It's a little more up to the client of whether they want to stand out or they want to fit into that space. There are different goals for different types of apps. So yeah, it depends on that. But I would say specific colors, there are certain times where certain colors seem to get a little overused in certain apps. You won't get the purple and bluey hues that everyone's doing or other color times. So yeah, if that's happening, especially say in the AI space when that started coming along, everything was purple and blues. Charlie Chapman: They're all butt holes, right? Isn't that the - Yes. It's Matthew Skiles: A Charlie Chapman: Lot of us. Have you made a lot of star icons or whatever? Matthew Skiles: I've drawn a few of those myself and I'm like, "What am I doing? What am I doing?" Charlie Chapman: Not to make too much of a reference, but that was a bit on the show community in the 2000s or whatever. And I just can't believe that that happened in real life. And every single time I see a new AI startup, I'm like, "How is this still happening? It's pretty crazy." Matthew Skiles: It is. It is. But yeah, just to finish my point there, that I will try to push people away from that. Sometimes they're like, "Let's do these colors." And I'm like, "Everybody is doing these colors. Could we do something else?" And sometimes I win that argument and sometimes not. But otherwise, we're usually open to most things. But there are some things I'm just like, "From my experience, this is a bit overused. We should dial it back a little bit if you want to stand out at all." Charlie Chapman: I guess the finishing part then would just, once you've nailed that down, then you just take it into Photoshop if you need extra materials or render something in Blender if you want a specific type of glass or whatever. And then that's kind of the end, you're sort of done at that point? Matthew Skiles: Yeah, pretty much. I guess there's a lot of refinements usually. Some of them you get it right pretty early on, but a lot of times there's minor tweaks going back and forth of just, "This is almost working, but we need to change the colors here or this shape doesn't quite work in this part of the app icon." But yeah, just refinements from there. Once you've settled on a concept, most of the time it works. There's rare cases where you might go down a path and it seemed like it was going to work. You though it would translate well, but it just doesn't quite translate from sketch to final design. So you have to back it up a bit and see how you can tweak it. But most of the time, I guess having done it so many times, you kind of get a feel for which ones just aren't going to translate even though it looks great on a sketch. So you don't show those ones. You like, "I love it, but it's not going to work. I know these don't translate." Charlie Chapman:

So for everyone listening who is a budding app icon designer themselves, or they're foolishly trying to design their own when they should instead hire the services of professional, what advice do you have based on things that you see people do? What are some of the mistakes people make that you see often you're like, "Ah, just change this or no, you should never do that." Matthew Skiles: Probably one of the first obvious mistakes is just having, if you're doing a simpler one where you have a symbol in the middle of your app icon, is making it too big. Just people want to scale it up, so it's filling most of the squirrel. And I guess that's why Apple has the grid guidelines for that. But just usually that is a mistake I'll see often if someone made it themselves or they're new to making app icons. And I used to make the same mistake myself, but just give it a bit of breathing room. Just shrink it down just a little bit and it'll look nicer. I know you want it big, but just a few pixels down and it'll be better, I think is the main thing I see on app icons that just don't quite work is too big a logo is put in the center or symbols. Charlie Chapman: And that's like what? Keep it within weighted. Obviously things can break out, but generally speaking, try to keep it within the outer circle that they draw in their - Matthew Skiles: I would say you actually want to be a little smaller than that. I think that's sometimes where people run into the issue is they go all the way to the circle. Even if it is a circle, sometimes that just doesn't quite look right for certain shapes that just you want to be a bit smaller. I guess again, it's a thing you learn over time and just optically it doesn't look quite right. But I would say if it's not looking right, maybe just shrink it down a little bit and see how that looks because it's a common mistake. Charlie Chapman: And then I guess I'd be remiss to not bring up in the year 2026 to a designer, how is it feeling right now with the massive AI world? Because that kind of feels, I mean, coders listening, obviously it's coming for them and impacts us. But I imagine a significant amount of people, even people listening are like, "I just had Codex do mine and it seems fine." Matthew Skiles: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, that's definitely the big thing at the moment is what the future holds for AI in that way. At the moment, I would say I don't use it for my work because I love the process of doing it myself, of coming Charlie Chapman: Up with ideas. Well, that's the differentiating factor, right? Yes. The moment you can just use it, it kind of like, well, what's the point in having somebody else do this? Matthew Skiles: Yeah. I guess I would say the upside of it is it is useful for generating interesting ideas from what I see of other people doing it, of generating variant ideas or complex. Again, I think it's interesting for the colorful mesh gradients and things and shader stuff that it does. There's interesting stuff there, I think. But for the downside, I would say often I find it almost gives people choice paralysis when they use it to try and come up with what they want. If they're presenting it to me, sometimes I'll have people come to me and they say, "I've got these ideas that AI gave me for my app icon." And you will say, "I think we should do this because this is better for a system native-looking app icon." And then they will go and then generate 50 more options and they just keep having options and you are like, "At some point you have to make a choice so I can go in that direction with you." But they get a bit choice paralysis on that. Yeah, I found it a little unhelpful when people use it too much to try and help themselves. It almost hinders them, but they can't see it because they think it's helping them. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, it's an interesting thing because it's kind of like having infinite resources or no constraints. It kind of blocks you from moving forward sometimes. I'm sure you get lots of references from it. I know I do this a lot. I work with designers significant amount in my day job, but also I do AI generate a lot of stuff. Just the amountain of stuff I need to generate is more than any human can possibly keep up with. And sometimes I'll send reference stuff that I'm pretty happy with and I'm like, "I want a designed version of this that looks nicer." And sometimes they give me exactly that, and sometimes it's like they'll just ignore it. And I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm so glad you ignored what I sent you because I'll give you just a specific example. We have an event in Canada coming up and I came up with a thing and I spent way too long getting a nice reference. And this person just looked around Google Maps, found a cool looking bridge, and designed a whole thing based on the architecture of that bridge. And it's like never in a million years would I have thought to prompt AI to do that. And so that was a really long-winded way to ask. Do you sometimes try to take a crack at things ignoring the reference material they give you, or do you find it more helpful actually when you get a lot of that reference material? Matthew Skiles: It really just, it's a case-by-case basis. There are times where I really appreciate it because they have a specific idea in mind and the AI-generated image gives them a way to convey that to me, whereas it would've taken a lot longer to find what it is they're looking for. And there are times where, yeah, they may look good, but they're not good for what we need. So you do have to try and ignore parts of it and build something new out of it. So it's a balancing act of that. But yeah, there are definitely probably more often than not times where I appreciate that they have something AI generated to give me as a guide of where they want to go because it is a helpful tool in that way. Charlie Chapman: Yeah. The ability to communicate things visually. I've talked about it probably a lot here before,

certainly online, but we have a Slack channel at work called Topic Dumb Ideas, which is where half the things we do in marketing comes from. And since the advent of good AI image generation, the amount of things we've been able to do because your thread can very quickly spiral into you're building a product because you can just be like, "Oh no, it should look like this. Oh no, what if we did this?" And then you take it to the professionals who actually. But it's more about how quickly you can convey an idea that you, when you're talking to somebody, you can just sketch out really quickly this idea, but the person can't do that back to you. Matthew Skiles: Yeah. Yeah. No, that is definitely where it's beneficial. And I don't see a lot of downside in that. As long as you can not get too attached to the AI generated image of saying, "It needs to look like this." That's where issues can arise. But if you cannot do that, then there's really no problem. It's a beneficial Charlie Chapman: Tool. I guess it's like designing, not using wireframes and designing at color or whatever. It's hard to focus on the part you're trying to focus on. Matthew Skiles: Yeah, that's just a complaint I've had a few times is just you're almost stuck trying to replicate the AI design for people and they're like, "I want this." And they're like, "But what do you want me for then if you just want me to redraw that thing for you because you already have Charlie Chapman: That?" I've had that so much. Well, yeah, but me defending the person, it's like you can look at it and be like, "This looks AI design. I want this, but not AI designed. It's got the right stuff." And I can tell you, again, having gone through this a lot, it's like the amount of times the person will give me something, and I'm kind of annoyed because it's like, I can't just drop this. It's not exactly the same. And then months later, I've been using their real designs for months, and then I go back and I run into somewhere where I haven't changed it or I just happened to see my AI one and I'm like, "I can't believe I thought that was good." It's embarrassing. It's very weird how much you get attached to something, especially if you just start using it as a placeholder. Matthew Skiles: I'm guilty of it myself. It'll happen. I'll make something. I'm like, "This is it. This is the perfect design." And they're like, "We want to go a different way." And I'm like, "But this is perfect. Why would you go a different way?" It's human to hold onto the thing that you first have that you think is great. Charlie Chapman: It's just how it is. And you mentioned you don't use it in your work, but then you also mentioned there are interesting areas, in particular really with textures and gradients and stuff like that. Is that something that you are experimenting with or is there a bit where you're like with the tone of the way things are right now, it's kind of like, why add that third rail into my design? It's easier to just say I'm a hundred percent handcrafted or whatever. Matthew Skiles: I think at the moment, yeah, that's kind of my position is just stand back and watch and see how it plays out because yeah, I'm not sure where it lands and what it is. I think I'm generally that way with most tools. I'm a little cautious and slow to jump into them. I'm the same same with Sketch. When Sketch first came out, everyone was jumping on board saying it's the best thing ever. And I was like, "I got Photoshop, what do I need that for?" And eventually I was like, "I love Sketch. This is amazing, but I'm happy with the tools I have, but I'm happy to see other people doing it." And then eventually be like, "Yep, this seems like something that's going to stick around." Because there are lots of tools that come along and they don't stick around. I'm like, "Well, what did I learn to use it for then because somebody discontinued it?" So if I'm doing my job and it's all working out as is, I don't need that tool currently. If I do, then I'll go down that path. But until I need it, I don't need to jump on board quite yet, I think. But we'll see. Maybe in the future I'll regret that and I'll be like, "I should have jumped on earlier." Charlie Chapman: I don't know. I feel like in particular with this moment of AI, the tooling changes so fast that this is not advice to put your head in the sand and ignore it because I think, especially on the coding side, that can really burn you. But also it's changing so fast that the expertise you build up oftentimes becomes obsolete so fast anyway, that it's better to get into find a workflow that works and then keep doing that and then slowly change it over time. Matthew Skiles: From an outside perspective, I think almost it seems like it will just be easier and easier to do things as the tools improve. So it's not like you're going to get left behind. It'll become easier to jump in whenever you want to in the future like most tools are. So you're not at much danger to just see how it goes in the future in that way. But yeah, I've seen a lot of interesting things with people being able to build their own generators that can generate different textures, images and things. And they can tweak the settings, I guess, things like fable they've been using, things like that. So yeah, I'm kind of fascinated by that at the moment. I want to look more into that of just being able to build your own custom tools to make your own custom assets in that way. Tha's more interesting to have a lot more control over what you're generating. That seems interesting to me, so I will be spending a little bit of time on that. Charlie Chapman: Nice. All right. Well, I think we're getting close to time here. So I'll ask you the question I ask everybody in the show, which is what's a person or people out there that have inspired you in your work that you'd recommend others check out? Matthew Skiles: Yeah, I'm going to say Jasper Hauser, I believe is how you say his

name. He does the dark room app now. But one of the app icons I loved the most when I got started in this and I wanted to make app icons was The AppSapper, the little Raygun, the green Raygun app, and his work and the disco app as well, and just the stuff that he did at the time, those were so cool and so detailed that you don't see his app icon work so much anymore now because he does darkroom and stuff except for the amazing alternates he does with Darkroom. But if you see his older work, if you look that up, there's some really great stuff that he used to do Charlie Chapman: There. It's crazy how much him and the panic people and that delicious era of Mac Apps, there's a lineage that really starts there that you can trace through everything. And it's so cool. Matthew Skiles: It is. As I always say, when I was a kid, that was my dream, and it's still my dream now is to just try and make as cool a stuff as what they were doing back then. That's my hope. Charlie Chapman: Awesome. All right. Well, thank you for your time. This was super fun. Thank you. It was. Anytime I can get somebody from New Zealand, I think, are you number three? I mean, I'm counting Riley Testit who he spent some time in New Zealand, but he's not currently there. Also has a North American accent. But then Devin Davies, obviously, who's basically your neighbor, I think, as everybody in New Zealand is neighbors with each other. But it's more challenging for you with time zones, but I appreciate you making the time for us to hang out. No Matthew Skiles: Worries. Very happy to. Appreciate it for having me on. Charlie Chapman: So where can people find you and your work? Matthew Skiles: You can find me at matthewskyles.com or I'm on X, Matthew Kyles or Mastodon or Blue Sky as well. Yeah, those are the places I usually hang out. You can follow my work. I post half icons pretty often. Every time somebody says, "It's out, it's launched." You can show it off. I'm like, "Yes, I can show off another one." Charlie Chapman: You had physical representations of yours at this dub dub, right? Because they had that video at the end. Matthew Skiles: I did, yeah. Tide Guide was in the rap music video. That was pretty cool. He holds it up and says Tide Guide. That's a pretty unique experience. I don't know if I can top that. We'll see Charlie Chapman: Next Matthew Skiles: Year. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, yeah. Let's see what you can do next year. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks again for coming on. Matthew Skiles: No worries at all. Charlie Chapman: And thank you all for listening. So Launched is a part of the Revenue Cap podcast family. If you want to learn more about the growth side of the mobile app business, you can check out Subclub, which is the podcast hosted by my good friend and colleague, David Barnard. And then you can check out revenuecap.com to learn about the easiest way to grow and monetize your mobile app business. And of course, learn more about launched at launchedfm.com. And if you want to see our pretty faces or your little app icon grid that you held up in the middle there, check out the YouTube channel because this is a video podcast now. So definitely do that and you can find that at launchedfm.com. All right, I'll see you all in two weeks. Bye.