Taking to the stage at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2013, Senior Vice President Jony Ive introduced iOS7’s significant visual changes to the iPhone. Skeuomorphism was out , and flat UI design was in.

This is Day 18 of 30 Days of iPhone, a look at the moments that shaped the smartphone era .

Goodbye, Real World, Hello Flat iPhone

Skeuomorphism replicates real-world textures and the principles of physical movement. It’s having the graphic of a spiral at the top of a notebook page, the look of green felt as a background, or sticky notes that sit over the screen in a yellow square. Since the launch of the first iPhone and iPhone OS, Apple had employed this look.

Ive took these principles and threw them out . In place of the comforting human nature, iOS 7 offered flat windows with vector graphics, neon colour gradients, clean typography with the Helvetica Neue font, transparency and 3D effects using the iPhone’s gyroscopes to replicate real-world movement on the digital screen.

Hardware And Software Integration Starts With The iPhone UI

The new look and feel of the software brought an intellectual rigor to the iPhone. One look at competing smartphones makes the impact of Apple’s hardware design clear; that was less true of Steve Jobs’ UI decisions. iOS 7 started to bring these together in a single language. As Daring Fireball’s John Gruber wrote at the time : “The software is now of a piece with the hardware. Two sides of the same coin. Not hardware design and software design. Just design.”

This is Day 18 of 30 Days of iPhone. Yesterday, we looked at the embarrassing launch of Apple Maps .