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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T10:03:03+00:00

I’m building an iOS app and I have all the functionality going already so

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I’m building an iOS app and I have all the functionality going already so it’s time to sit down and make it beautiful. I’m not very savvy in this area, this is the first app I’ve made and I’d like some good, up to date or recent, resources/tutorials on iOS interface design.

I already know how to change the UINavigationBar for instance. But I’d also like to customize my buttons, my tab bar, menu bar, bar button items, and so on. Any good resources for this?

To be more specific, I’m more interested on HOW to do the customization on these elements, not so much as to look for good ideas on how to make them loon, though those are appreciated.

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  1. Editorial Team

    There are dozens of great UI designers around the internetz and a couple of them have great websites!

    You can absolutely use them as reference and as inspiration. But you will need to do the work (coding + grafix) on your own.

    Your question is a bit to wide ranged to answer it easily. (almost) Every UIKit control has different methods to manipulate its grafix/design. E.g. a UIButton is easy to customize by setting its button style to plain and set a custom Background Image, but that won’t work for a UISlider.

    Custom images are a popular method to implement a nice design as UI. It’s pretty great to work with a good artist or do it yourself if you are experienced with design tools like photoshop and simply add the images of your design to your apps but never forget the weight of images.

    Keep the file sizes in mind and don’t let a simple app have more than a few mb. (Especially if you want to support retina devices)

    In addition to that don’t underestimate the power of core graphics. You can do a lot of fancy design stuff like nice gradients as backgrounds or shadow effects by code without the need of images.

    Since iOS5 there is a protocol called UIAppearance. It helps a lot to implement custom UI designs but sadly it is not backwards compatible. Just take a look at my favorite tutorial site for iOS stuff about UI customization in iOS 5. Ray Wenderlich – User Interface Customization in iOS 5

    And last but not least some common design websites for mobile UI:
    dribble
    creattica
    tapfancy

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