In continued Apple v. Samsung court proceedings, a top Samsung designer denied copying Apple’s icons, and an expert witness said the Cupertino company’s design patents should be invalidated due to prior art.
Samsung on Tuesday called to the stand Jeeyuen Wang, a senior designer at the South Korean company who gave testimony through a translator, in an effort to counter Apple’s allegations that multiple Samsung devices copied the layout and imagery of iOS, reports CNet.
Earlier in the trial, Apple offered internal Samsung documents which compared the iPhone side-by-side with the Korean company’s handsets, alleging iOS icons and UI assets were blatantly copied. Wang admitted that she did look at products from other companies, including Apple, but denied stealing the icons outright, saying instead that it was part of the design process.
“I also look at the icons that come up on Web sites or Webs, and airport signing systems, so I’d pay attention to all these things,” Wang said.
The designer claims hundreds of people around the world worked tirelessly on Samsung’s iconography, adding that she herself was only able to sleep two or three hours a night.
In refuting Apple’s copycat accusations, Wang gave specific examples of how the designs of certain icons were decided. She notes the photo app icon seen on Samsung handsets was inspired by a wallpaper image, and not the sunflower icon that appears in iOS.
“At the time, there was a wallpaper that was in the image of flowers for an AMOLED LCDs and everyone in our team kind of liked the image,” Wang said. “We had come to a conclusion that we would adopt this image for the icon.”
Wang also said Samsung’s phone app icon, referred to internally as a “dumbbell,” was there before she began work on the project in 2002 and was green because the color had the connotation of “go.”
Read more: Apple Insider
