The Oscars for application design take place once a year during the Apple WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference) event, and in 2022 two Canadian teams were nominated for awards.
There are many categories for both games and applications at the show, and the Montreal-based Transit app was nominated in the Interaction category.
In the “Visual Images and Graphics” category, the exclusive Apple Arcade Lego Star Wars Castaways won the top prize. This game comes from Gameloft Studios in Montreal.
Lego Star Wars Castaways with creative director Jacques Durand
Lego Star Wars Castaways started with the vision of Jacques Durand to make a Lego game with an environment that looks more like a Lego movie and less like the popular Lego games from developer Travelers Tales.
Durand said he was the perfect host of the project, as he was a self-proclaimed AFOL (adult Lego fan). He has been playing with Danish toys for years and even dipped his fingers into the Lego stop motion scene.
However, turning the idea of a Lego Star Wars game into a world, unlike anything before, was a big task for his Gameloft studio. In this regard, Duran praised his team in Montreal for being able to adapt and develop engine parts and optimizations to create a world that seems to be made entirely of Lego.
Asked what was the main element that led to his team’s victory, Durand replied simply: “This is the love of bricks.”
He went on to explain that his team is full of passionate Lego fans and developers, who have all embraced this digital Lego challenge and worked to make sure the game not only looks good, but also feels realistically built by Lego.
Transit and lead designer Sam Vermet
Before the event, I managed to catch up with Sam Vermet, co-founder and lead designer of Transit, to talk about its application and what it means to be at the design awards for him and his team.
If you are not familiar with Transit, this is an application that has existed for a long time. Following its redesign in 2018, it is a fantastic example of easy-to-navigate interfaces that are clear enough to be read and understood at a glance.
Vermet told me that the Transit team was joking about being nominated for an application design award for years, so the fact that he was actually at the event was a dream come true. However, this did not happen by accident. Vermette is a huge mapping enthusiast and has experience in industrial design. He decided to start developing applications when the first iPhone equipped with the App Store was launched, and realized how personal and important our devices will become.
He has since moved away from development to focus more on application design, but this life experience still boils down to helping him create the easy-to-use Transit application that is still so popular today.
Asked what makes Transit design at the highest level, Vermet said he was proud of everything from the local transit color matching feature to the easy-to-read design. However, Transit’s strong focus on one-handed use and the ability to swipe down to go back is what it believes has helped transit to the upper echelon of transit applications.
Unfortunately, Transit did not win in its category, but Vermette told me that he managed to talk to the winning team designer, who said that Transit was a significant inspiration for Slopes, a ski and snowboarding app.
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