I’m working with my friend Al Briggs on an iPad version of the Emergent Task Planner, primarily on user interface concepts and layout. Al’s doing the coding. As is the case with these kind of projects, programmer Al is excited to see graphics, as designer Dave is excited to see working code. Al suggest that I start designing an application icon, and while I’m not sure exactly what the icon should be, I started doing some sketches.

The concepts above are the result of a quick 15-minute sketch session at Starbucks, playing with the following concepts I’d written down on a previous page:

• Emergent
• On-the-fly
• Low resistance
• Freeform
• Nonjudgmental
• Focus without strictness
• Planning
• Encouraging

These words are some of the associations I have with the Emergent Task Planner, so I then tried to think of visual ways to portray them. On the left are the idea of something that “emerges” from a collection of parts; the metaphor is that of a puzzle or tower of pieces (sort of like Jenga). Then on the right side, there are notions of buckets that can be filled with marbles, and multiple paths leading to a structured resolution. There’s nothing really here yet, but I am thinking of jumping into a 3D program and moving some stuff around to see what can arise. So begins the design process!

UPDATE: Hoo, here’s the Apple Icon Guidelines…I didn’t realize how high-res we could get. Exciting!