Review: iPhone Stencils

I woke up today to find these waiting for me:

I bought two so I could have one on my desk and one in my bag at *all* times. You never know when a creative idea might strike! I’d also imagine losing one wouldn’t be too hard at all.

There’s not really an awful lot one can say about these iphone stencils, they’re metal templates which help designers draw concept iPhone apps. Containing most of the elements an iPhone app designer would need: buttons, icons a slider etc.

The first thing I noticed as I opened the minimal packaging was the pencil. I love that they included a mechanical pencil – the idea, its sound and very nice. In practice however, I hate this pencil – its plasticky, its cheap and its utterly useless to me. A simple run-of-the-mill pencil would have satisfied me more than the cheap feeling and poor performance of this pencil. More than anything, it made the few rough edges around the stencil even more pronounced, which is kind of odd considering none of my pens or pencils seem to suffer from that.

Moving onto the stencil itself, as a design tool its perfectly balanced. it has the right number of shapes, does the job admirably – though I would’ve liked a square cutout to mimic the home button square, but its not like its necessary. There were a couple of issues however: it sucks up finger prints worse than anything I’ve seen in recent memory, which is disappointing considering the pictures on the store suggest that its almost a matte-type surface, which I would have preferred.

Smoothness is also a bit of a nagging point, the edges on the outside are not quite up to my standard of ’smooth’. Its rough enough to make your writing impliment jut out – at least in one place, where they’ve clearly cut out the template from the rest of the stock. I expected more from seeing the pictures of it to be perfectly honest. However, like I mentioned earlier, it all depends on your drawing implement of choice; with most I’d imagine the minimal roughness will not be noticeable – its just a little irritating for the needless perfectionists. uh huh… me.

Finally, the metal stock is really too thin. I’m sorry but this I just had to bring up, its incredibly thin – too thin in my view. It would take nothing to bend it out of shape, in fact so much so that I can see it easily being bent out of shape if left in a bag without being protected inside a hardback book. For $16 US each, plus the international shipping costs, I would have hoped for something a little bit more sturdy.

All things considered however, I think these stencils are a wonderful aid for sketching up iPhone app designs. I usually prefer photoshop to anything else, but sometimes you need that hands on-touch.

On that note, its time for bed. I’ve spent all day playing with these things, my desk is a mess and its well past 2:30 on a weekday!!

** Updated to include links to Design Commission website