For me – primarily as a life long gamer and secondly a 3d and motion graphics artist – The news of a proper high resolution stereoscopic VR headset was initially met with massive excitement but also mixed with an air of caution that this could be another uneventful experience of that seen in arcades of… Read more »
| Joe
Users of DSLR cameras, bridge cameras and indeed some advanced compact digital cameras will be aware of the option to record their digital images in either JPEG or raw formats (some DSLRs also offer the option of TIF, but that won’t be discussed here). It’s true that the subject of whether to shoot in JPEG… Read more »
| Maryna
Quick guide to Windows Phone 8 Icons Windows Phone pioneered the ‘Metro’ design language, the popular, iconic user interface paradigm used by thousands of apps to give end users a common basis from which to interact with their devices. The Windows Phone design philosophy is exemplified by clean, uncluttered app screens that operate quickly, minimize… Read more »
| Maryna
Small Icon sizes such as 16×16 pixels are often neglected in Icon Design, in my opinion though, this is where the real skill lies. In most cases simply scaling down a larger icon is not going to work and is often why for 16×16 pixel icons it is acceptable to drawn them in a slightly… Read more »
| Maryna
In a lot of projects we are asked to produce different color versions of the same icon, sometimes this is to represent a different icon state or to provide the end user with interface skinning options. By creating Icon sets you can make working with color easier, faster and prepare your Illustrator document for simpler editing. Global… Read more »
| 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 »
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 »
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