I was recently contracted to create a new icon set for a software product. I took on the job thinking it was logo design as usual but, quickly realized icon design is a whole new ball game.I had some obstacles to overcome: the files needed to be created in a new program specific for icon design (which I needed to learn fast!), it needed to be scaled down itty bitty and easily recognizable, it had to created for pc and mac (which of course are different in file type and size) and I needed to animate the icon for when the program was is "processing" mode.
It was a busy couple of weeks working on the above design and I am really happy to have had the opportunity. It's now a new skill set I can add to my portfolio. I enlisted a good deal of online resources to help me on my quest to design my first icon. Here are a few goodies that helped out:
Here is a quick step process of how this design came about.
My initial researched yielded these sketches. From here the client chose to pursue #4.
I went on to offer some choices in computer style and color schemes. We ended up working with blue & green colors for the 2 versions of software they supply.
The client choose to go with the open computer design. I showed multiple sizes of the icon and we tested how it looked it on the program.
Although it looked good on paper it needed to "pop" off the screen better. After tweaking the color, simplifying the background, changing the border to white from gray and thickening the outline of the computer it really wowed! Here is the final result:
Although it looked good on paper it needed to "pop" off the screen better. After tweaking the color, simplifying the background, changing the border to white from gray and thickening the outline of the computer it really wowed! Here is the final result:
This really was a fun project. I enjoyed the challenges and designing something so different from what I do on a daily basis.
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