
Yeah, I’ve been pretty busy lately. I mean…REALLY busy. It’s the sort of busy that makes me feel guilty for spending too long in the bathroom, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything I need to do. But I do see some relief in sight, so that’s the only thing keeping me hanging on. A Hawaiian vacation would be epic right about now…
So what has been keeping me so busy over the last month or so? Mobile UI design, and a whole lot of it. I had a client who was looking to re-skin their existing Android app into something more “clean and white, with glowing blue elements”. I ended up generating about 10 initial design concepts for them to choose from, so we had a lot of good options before really digging into the nuts and bolts of the re-skin. The end result turned out rather nice, and I’ll try to show the final designs here once it’s officially released.
Because of the large amount of initial concepts I generated, I’m now sitting on a handful of perfectly good mobile phone UI templates that don’t have a home. I’m keeping the best ones for myself to use on future projects (sorry!), but I thought I’d throw up a couple of them here on norebbo.com for anyone who’s interested.
So…here are two fully editable mobile phone UI templates in Photoshop (PSD) format, and they are free for the taking. I guess the best way to describe them is “white and clean” – they are totally generic, but do feature some blue highlights here and there. Please use them however you wish. Both are high resolution 480×800 layouts which works perfectly for Android devices. Converting these to landscape formats shouldn’t be too difficult if you’re handy with Photoshop.
Enjoy!

















To some, this may seem like a total “duh” tip – but you wouldn’t believe the number of people I run into that don’t know that you can directly select layers in Photoshop (from your canvas) without having to wade through the layers window. I am somewhat ashamed that even I didn’t know this until a few years ago. Immediately upon discovery, I couldn’t help but to think of all the wasted hours I had spent scrolling trough the layers dialog in search of elusive layers that I was too lazy to name.
My design philosophy is based around the premise that color needs to have a purpose. I like to apply my color palettes in a way that promotes good usability as opposed to aesthetic reasons alone. For example, the color red should should be limited to alert-type elements, and green usually is left for confirmations and metaphors of “success”. I know that’s an overly simplistic example, but I think you get my point. There’s usually a lot of thought that goes into deciding how a color should be used.
The reason for my tendency of using gray as a base color is that by doing so, I can indirectly focus the users attention on what matters. For example, if I’m designing a menu with some very important buttons that are critical to the flow of the user interface, those buttons need to stand out from the rest of the design. If everything else on the screen is as colorful as that very important button, a conflict occurs when there’s no clear indication as to what element is important and what action needs to be taken. By keeping the framework and all less important elements of the UI in gray tones (or other neutral colors), I can use color to draw attention to the things that are most important. 












