DailyUI 004 – Calculator

Challenge 4 was to design a calculator. Simple, one would think. But trying to make something different from most calculators out there isn’t as easy as it seems. I knew that I wanted something light in colour and separate the equal and delete buttons from the rest of the numpad.

My main inspiration here was the stock Android Calculator app, because in my opinion it is one of the better designed calculator apps even though it omits many features, making it simplistic to almost a fault. Consequentially because of this my design also became too simple. I omitted the more advanced features of calculators as I didn’t really take my time to think of how to implement them.

Truth be told, however, not much thought was put into this design at all. And for some reason I put the numbers upside down from most calculators. Kids, never try to design things after having just woken up.

Only self-made icon here is the backspace key. I guess I should have slapped on an AC key as well somewhere. What I did wanted to add was a history tab. That’s what you see at the top there.

The font of choice here is once again Roboto, as it felt like it was most fitting for this boxy design.

If anything, this felt more like a rush job than the previous designs. I realise in hindsight that I got stuck in just wanting to make something that looked nice, and completely forgot to think about usability. Personally then, this was a fail. Learnings for the future are to take a bit more time to think things through.

As always though, once it is uploaded, that’s it. Better luck next time, I guess.