| 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
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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