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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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).
Latest comments
Optimizing Adobe Illustrator: thrusting to the Earth orbital velocity
kaiser: when i got my site finished, i´ll get back to you guys, because there are some other things that should change pretty fast. e.g. gradient-tool and …
Designing an iconic language
kaiser: Very good article. thanks for sharing your know how!
Enlarge your icons
tobias: I think we will need bigger Icons as soon as monitors with 200 DPI or more will be widely used. P.S. Vector icons are on the Linux Desktop …
Fancy color names or Royal Blue
kontur: I definately get your point, and also agree, that sometimes it would enhance language's descriptive value not to speak in cmyk and rgb values (not …
10 Mistakes in Icon Design
shaah.myopenid.com: I wonder, why it isn't possible to see new comments. Democracy.