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… Read more »
This article looks at how to keep your Illustrator files ‘fully’ vector and still create an attractive vector Drop Shadow effect. For any icon designer 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… Read more »
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… Read more »
Axialis have recently released version 6.62 of their excellent ‘Icon Workshop‘ Icon Design software so I thought it was a good enough excuse to talk about the software and how I use it. Icon Workshop What does it do? Icon workshop has been around for a number of years now, prior to which there weren’t really… Read more »
I find the most efficient way to produce quality icons is to spend a good proportion of the time allocated for the project, on the initial ‘Style Development’ stage. It might sound pretty obvious but getting this part of the project spot on can save a great deal of time later on. The client needs… Read more »
Need iOS 9 Icon Sizes? Check out our new simple guide * UPDATED* 03/10/2012 * For the New iPad Retina display & iPhone 5 All you need to know about the required iPhone & iPad App Icon Sizes Apple’s iPad and more recently iPad 2 have been with us for quite a while now so… Read more »
Designing a Button Style Custom Icon This tutorial will explain the process of designing and creating an icon from one of my favourite sets of custom icons. This dark, metallic and slightly glossy set was produced for a ‘button-type’ custom icon design to be used in a PDA driven software application. The icons all feature… Read more »
For up-to-date information see: Android (4.1) Icon Size Guide Made Simple Android runs on many different hardware platforms with different screen sizes and pixel densities. For this reason it is a little more complex to create icons for compared to something like the iPhone, as depending on the platform your App is aimed at, you… Read more »
Keeping things crisp when Scaling Icons During a large custom icon design project with multiple application icon and interface icons, it can sometimes be a daunting task having to create multiple size versions of the same icon – assuming you’re working with pixel-based ‘bitmap’ raster icons. Indeed, in the majority of instances, it is not… Read more »
A Quick & Easy guide to Microsoft Windows Icon Size There is sometimes a little confusion over the different sizes required to create a Windows 7 Application Icon file. This is in some way brought about by the flexibility of the ICO format and its ability to ‘contain’ many image sizes and colour depths but… Read more »