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What icons are for
You would not believe it but in 1985 Apple asserted an idea in its developers’ guide to replace text messages with icons wherever possible. As though icons would be more clear to a novice user than words. Of course this is bollocks. It is much easier to express any idea in words.
Fancy color names or Royal Blue
It all started when our client wrote, seemingly as an afterthought: “Please change the color of the icon to royal blue.” To tell you the truth, this request struck me as rather unusual. We have dark blue, light blue and ordinary blue, but no royal blue that I knew about. So I did some research.
10 Mistakes in Icon Design
It is much easier to criticize somebody else’s work than to create something cool yourself. But if you apply a systematic approach to criticizing, make a numbered list and prepare illustrations, it will be regarded as a fully-fledged analysis! In my opinion, icon design is undergoing a transitional period. On the one hand, screen resolutions are increasing, hence enhancing icons. On the other hand, we still have good old pixels. Icons sized 16×16 and even smaller are still widely used. And so, here are the most commonly observed mistakes in icon design…
Drawing an Icon: Sketches and Metaphors
Rejoice, our young fans of digital miniature! The festival has finally come to your town. Turbomilk in my person is starting a series of posts on how we draw icons: from the moment of placing the task and receiving an advance payment to sending the final versions to the customer. Eugene Artsebasov, our illustrator, was so kind to assist me.
Designing an iconic language
Last fall I made a brief report at a conference organized by RusCHI and 1C in the context of celebrating the World Usability Day. I was talking about designing a user interface icon language. Following the “better later than never” principle, I hereby bring the same report to your attention in the form of text with illustrations.
Donald Norman’s Three Aspects of Design
A couple of hours ago, on the Olympia Stadium, Turin, the Flame of the XX Winter Olympics was ignited. Now that’s a good point to recall the pictograms which go beyond computer interfaces. Traditionally, every Olympic Games have a unique set of pictograms representing various sports. This is how we have a brilliant opportunity to look at different approaches to one and the same task of design.
The Icon Book
If one studies the evolution of user interfaces since the 80’s of the last century up to now, it is difficult to get rid of the feeling that the trade of icon-building, which hardly was able to become an engineering science (e. g., in the Macintosh System 7 interface) can now be regarded as a fine art (Windows XP and Mac OS X).
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articlesWacom Bamboo Fun M Pen&Touchemailtoid.net/i/27187ea2/…: Thanks for sharing :) I have an ANCIENT wacom tablet (not even sure what the model is) and Im looking to get a new one...you know... that works. I really like painting in photoshop so I was kind of planning to get an Intuos 4 medium, but I hear that the rough surface on them causes you to go through pen nibs like crazy. The bamboo is tempting because of the price, and it may be a good solution since Im not even sure if I will like using a tablet.
articlesTutorial: drawing a 3D character from a plain logojoukov: Evgeniya uses BenQ 241W and its calibrated by Spyder 3. Here at Turbomilk we prefer to switch off any color management in Adobe products.
articlesTutorial: drawing a 3D character from a plain logoCzerny: I really love your wonderful work! Could you please tell me what color profiles you use and which displays? Would you recommend to work in sRGB or in Adobe RGB if you create something like this? Thaaaanks and Merry Christmas to Russia!! :-)
articles10 Mistakes in Icon Designhellelampe.myopenid.com/: Thank you for the article! It did help me a lot.
articlesLooking for an alternative to Basecamp: review of PBworks Project Editionclaimid.com/kylekeller: Nice post, especially your part about how to look for these tools. I spent some time playing around and settled on ProjectSpaces -- www.projectspaces.com, because although it did not have every feature in the book, I was able to easily setup projects and not have to take too much time training clients on how to use it. Might want to give it a shot too.