Icon Designers Blog

Application Icons

Application Icons

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When someone asks me for a ‘set of application icons to cover all platforms’ they are usually shocked by just how many different sizes and formats are required. In fact, this is something that seems to evolve and increase every few months. There is some overlap across legacy platforms but most newer mobile platforms choose… Read more »

Email Icon

Designing Cross Platform App Icons

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I thought it might be useful for designers and clients alike to see how we approach a typical App Icon design project. In this case study the client requested an App Launcher Icon for an Email App developed on multiple platforms. The first thing to consider when creating an icon for different platforms is how to… Read more »

Windows Phone 8 Icon Design

Windows Phone 8 Icon Size Guide

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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 »

Icon Design Tutorial - Small Icons

Designing 16×16 pixel icons in Photoshop

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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 »

Pixel Preview v2

Icon Design Tips: Multiple Windows And Pixel Preview Mode

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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 »

Metro Icon Design

The Rise of Metro Icons

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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 »

Free Windows Icons

Free Windows Icons

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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 »

result

How to create the globe icon in Photoshop

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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 »

Windows 8 ‘Metro’ Icons

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Windows 8 looks to be the biggest leap in operating systems since Windows 95 with a very fresh approach both in terms of aesthetics and usability. Microsoft is of course making lots of big and bold claims about the performance of Windows 8, which may or may not be accurate, but I’m more interested in… Read more »

adobe logos

Why Fireworks Rocks for Rendering Crisp Icons

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As an Icon Designer I am a big fan of Adobe Fireworks, which doesn’t get the kudos of its more popular siblings such as Photoshop and Illustrator but there are some things it does far better and most revolve around its excellent handling of the PNG file format. What is so great about PNG? The… Read more »

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