An Icon Designer's Blog

Five basics of great icon design

Adam Parrish — Wed, 02 May 2012 08:00:44 +0000

Categories: Icon Design, Icon Design Tips

We are back to basics this week: our contributing editor looks at some of the elements of effective icon design. A set of well designed icons can make a big difference to the look and usability of any website or application. Whether you are on the designing or commissioning side of the icon equation, it’s good to never take their ...

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Free Windows Icons

Adam Parrish — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 08:12:13 +0000

Categories: Custom Icons, Free Windows Icons, Icon Design

Tags: custom icons, free custom icons, free icons, free windows icons, windows 7 icons, windows icons

It has actually been a while since we released our first set of free windows icons, but in case you missed them on the main site, here they are again. I have also included a new set of ‘hot’ and ‘disabled’ states for each icon. The free icon set of 20 icons is designed in a windows 7 type style ...

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How to create the globe icon in Photoshop

Olga Polyakova — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:04:33 +0000

Categories: Custom Icons, Icon Design, Icon Design Tips, Icon Design Tutorial

Tags: Icon Design Tips, icon design tutorial

In this lesson I’ll tell how to draw an object that is very often used in icons. This object can easily either spoil or improve image, the thing is in details. I’ll use 256x256px icon size in the lesson, but all the rules below are valid for any size. Perhaps only for icons in size 16×16 and 24×24, there are ...

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Custom Icons for GIS Software

Adam Parrish — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:00:05 +0000

Categories: Custom Icons, News, Software Icons

Tags: custom icons, Icon Project, software icon design

The latest addition to our portfolio is an icon design project recently completed for Geograt GmbH. Geograt specialise in Geographical Information Systems software and required an icon style that would fit in with Windows 7 but also reflect their brand identity. For more information, please visit our Icon Design Portfolio. Thanks, Adam

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Windows 8 ‘Metro’ Icons

Joe — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 10:00:49 +0000

Categories: Icon Design

Tags: metro icons

Windows 8 looks to be the biggest leap in operating systems since Windows 95 with a very fresh approach both in terms of aesthetics and usability. Microsoft is of course making lots of big and bold claims about the performance of Windows 8, which may or may not be accurate, but I’m more interested in its ‘full circle’ icon design ...

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Icon design software: My favourite toolkit

Olga Polyakova — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:00:11 +0000

Categories: Icon Design, Icon Design Software

Tags: Fireworks, Icon Design, Icon Workshop, Illustrator

What do you need to know to create a perfect icon? Which are the best graphic editors to use in your work? Do you really need so much? When the first graphic interfaces appeared, and nobody knew about “icon design” as a specialty, icons were small and monochrome as displays. With higher screen resolutions, the number of icons and the ...

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Making your icons package a winner on all fronts

Adam Parrish — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:00:26 +0000

Categories: Icon Design Tips

Tags: winning distinctions

This week we discuss a set of distinctions that we’ve mentioned before on this blog but which we need to revisit every so often in this business: What are the criteria that make a good design package? How do we make our icons package a winner in all aspects of design? It’s true that every person, designer or non-techie, has ...

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Asking simple questions to create a great design brief

Adam Parrish — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:00:17 +0000

Categories: Icon Design Tips

Tags: design criteria

Although we’ve been focused on icon design tutorials for designers in recent months, there are other aspects of this business that we want to cover from time to time. For example, how do we want our clients to communicate with us when commissioning icons? What are the best design principles that we need to take into account in our work? ...

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How to Create Vector Drop Shadows in Illustrator

Joe — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:00:09 +0000

Categories: Icon Design

Tags: vector drop shadows

This article looks at how to keep your Illustrator files ‘fully’ vector and still create an attractive Drop Shadow effect. It’s a straight-forward process to create a nice, feathered, transparent drop shadow in Photoshop, and the same process can be followed in Illustrator too by using the ‘Effect -> Stylize -> Drop Shadow’ command. However, I find the effect can ...

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Icon Design Software: ‘Icon Workshop’ Part II

Adam Parrish — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:00:57 +0000

Categories: Icon Design Software, Icon Design Tips

Tags: Icon Design Workshop

Icon Scaling What I really love about Icon Workshop is its fantastic scaling engine. I did a comparison in a previous post (Why Fireworks Rocks for Icons), of how the Adobe products render off 16×16 PNG files and the results were different for each product but none of them compares to how well Icon Workshop can scale PNG files. Normally ...

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