iOS tally mark notification indicator

I’ve gone into great detail in the past about the small but powerful details of the operating systems we use daily for communication. After 10 years of using Apple’s mobile operating system, some design choices have been globally accepted. For example, notification indicators. Why do they have to be red? Sure, I understand that it clearly indicates a notification, but it’s so stressful to look at (which I’m sure is the point).

Recently I explored what it look like if those notification indicators never went away. Then I started thinking about alternative patterns we used to count. Roman numerals are an obvious choice, but after thinking about the humble tally mark, I realized how funny and insane it would be to use this instead of standard numbers.

The power of tally marks is that they give a more immediate sense of scale when looking at a number, but it’s much harder to parse what that exact number might be. Looking at this design, you can imagine a world where you have so many unread notifications and tally marks that your phone becomes essentially unusable.

This would never get built, but if any of you ever decide to jailbreak iOS and create this. Please, let me know.

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