Chelsey Wiley

Have you ever taken a moment away from scrolling to  take in the beauty of the app thumbnails on your phone? If not,  pause reading for a moment and look at them. They’re truly amazing miniature pieces of art.  Yes, I know they’re mostly just logos, but they’re also tiny pieces of creativity, vision, function, and value all wrapped into 180px.

.

 

This first occurred to me while being stuck somewhere without signal. I was absent mindedly staring at my phone when it hit me just how similar the The Google photos icon and the iOS photos icons are. But, the more I really looked at the icons the more I was reminded of the sunflower that used to represent “photos” back on my first iPhone. So, I started looking more, taking a minute to appreciate these tiny pieces of art. The more I looked, the more I saw the creativity in each one. There were “collections” or styles of icon ones that were the same across a product suite, like Google. The Amazon suite with the A-Z arrow/smiles and every outdoor gear thumbnail on my phone represented a mountain, yet they all varied.

 

I started looking into apps that are more specific and less of a collection and found these too were uniquely interesting:  The sound coming out of a book representing “Audible.”  The bike pedals that make up the ‘P’ for Peloton. The LG logo encompasses a smiley face, a sideways PacMan, and the company name! (Or at least that’s what I see, but that’s the beauty of art.) But, even with all of the cool pieces of miniature art on my phone there was one that stood out about the rest: Instacart.

 

If I were to ask you what the Instacart logo is, odds are you’d say “it’s a carrot” and you wouldn’t be wrong.  However, Instacart’s logo is more than a carrot to me. When looking at the miniature piece of art in the palm of my hand I experience what is known as a “Gestalt Switch.” Much like the “Rabbit-duck illusion” made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein, or the “Eskimo-Face illusion” by Elizaabeth Douglass, there is a singular image I can see two ways. I can see the original carrot, true to its roots (pun intended) but I can also see an arrow pointing to a pin (like that you would see on a map.)

 

This new outlook that I have holding “an art gallery in the palm of my hand” has led me down a path of mindfulness.  Ultimately helping my own creativity, and it’s all thanks to that waiting room without any signal.