For a while now we have seen a lot of demand for much cleaner simpler Icon styles. No doubt some of this was prompted by Microsoft’s Windows 8 user interface but I think the style has also been made popular by some mobile devices and of course the desire to be just a little bit… 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 »
In the last blog we looked at brainstorming as a creativity tool that can be used in icon design. We move on to another tool that can also be used for generating general ideas for icons or finding specific solutions for a project. The SCAMPER creativity tool can be considered to be directed brainstorming or… 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 »
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. This free windows icon set of 20 icons is designed… 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 »
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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