| Maryna
Despite the fact that most of my icons are drawn in vector editors, their output is almost always in a bitmap format. Use Pixel Preview mode to understand how Illustrator divides objects into pixels. In Adobe Illustrator you can open multiple windows of a single document at the same time. Each window can have different… Read more »
| Maryna
When designing Icons I prefer to create a page with multiple icons displayed so I can see how the icons look together as a set. I find this very important and convenient when trying to ensure a consistent style across all the icons I am designing. For example, I have a file in Adobe Illustrator… Read more »
Fortunately, the days when only one bit was given for transparency (that is, a pixel was either transparent or not) are long gone. Thanks to the 8-bit alpha-channel, the creation of extremely beautiful icons with perfectly smooth lines has become much easier. The edges of icons don’t look like stubs any more, but this is… Read more »
Our guest contributor devises a creativity tool – to stretch the imagination and play with ideas for icon development. Recently a friend invited me to subscribe to a cool online file storage and sharing facility called Dropbox, which I did. I found the clean, clutter-free pages of Dropbox quite refreshing and easy to use. The… Read more »
This week our guest writer contributes the first of a series of articles on creativity tools – to get you out of a pickle and generating ideas for your icon projects. Brainstorming is one of the more commonly used creativity tools that can come in handy when developing an icons project. So flexible is this… Read more »
One of the most complicated things in 3D icon creation is selection and construction of right perspective. You are lucky, if specification for the development of an icon follows some style guide, which has a detailed description of required perspective and points of view. Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines: Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines (three-dimensional… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
What is the best icon design software 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 colors in them have grown… Read more »
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… Read more »
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Telephone: +44 (0) 7801292181
Email: adam@creativefreedom.co.uk
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