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 »
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 »
| Joe
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 »
…well that includes everyone really. 🙂 “Out with the Old and in with the New” As we followed our annual family routine just after midnight on New Year’s Eve, (and I don’t just mean just having far too much to drink!) of opening the back door to let out 2011 and then opening the front… 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 »
| Joe
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 »
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