Apple’s Spotlight Location Icons

Fascinating look by Rusty Mitchell (via Sebastiaan de With) at Apple’s location icons, used in Spotlight for iOS 8:

In our iOS 8 UI Kit for Illustrator post, I mentioned becoming obsessed with finding all of Apple’s new Spotlight Location icons. I was excited to discover these icons because they are the first large-scale generalized set of pictograms created by Apple, and I was curious to see the depth of the set and how harmonious it is when viewed together. To date I’ve been able to locate 96 of these icons, but there are a few that I have seen in Maps that I haven’t been able to trigger in Spotlight. I’m sure there are still others that I have yet to find at all. In this post, I want to take a moment to highlight a little about the icons and then — since you can only search Spotlight for nearby locations — give some instructions on how to create a GPX file and use Xcode’s handy Simulate Location feature to search for location types that may not be available near you.

As Sebastiaan also notes, I’d love an in-depth look at Apple’s landmark icons used in Maps but absent from Spotlight results (here’s the Colosseum in Rome and Duomo in Milan, as shown in Apple Maps).