Touch Gesture Reference Guide

The Touch Gesture Reference Guide is a unique set of resources for software designers and developers working on touch-based user interfaces. The guide contains: 1) an overview of the core gestures used for most touch commands 2) how to utilize these gestures to support major user actions 3) visual representations of each gesture to use in design documentation and deliverables 4) an outline of how popular software platforms support core touch gestures.

The Touch Gesture Reference Guide was conceived of, researched, illustrated, and designed by Craig Villamor, Dan Willis, Luke Wroblewski and Jennifer Rhim (document design). Download the full PDF here.

5 Comments

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David
April 20, 2010 at 9:02 am

At first glance, I imagine it could be difficult to distinguish between spread/pinch and “press and drag.” Hopefully, interfaces would be designed where only one is sensible at a time.

Milan Mijatovic
April 20, 2010 at 9:46 am

This is a great resource, thanks a lot for the work.

I am curious about the way you represent rotation. I expected to see something that resembled a combination lock turning motion. Is it not used because it potentially overlaps with pinch and spread?

Wolftrouble
April 20, 2010 at 8:07 pm

I’m a little surprised you chose to represent pinch and zoom with two pictures – my gut says it feels like it indicates you need to tap with fingers together, then tap with fingers apart. Why not represent it with the first picture for each of pinch and zoom, but indicate the motion with arrows outwards or inwards? After all, it’s the vector that matters, not the endpoint.