sickofmusic.com

Everybody thinks making icons is just grabbing a brush in one hand and amouse in the other, But to tell ya the truth its a gruling hard task , Probably harder then designing a whole website. The Composition i need todo in one friggin single icon is simply unbareable, Most of the times i start off by painting the object in vector format in flash because its vector i can enlarge or reduce its size and not hurt the object itself.

Alot of people paint in vector painting programs like freehand and illustrator, I find them hard to work with and too complicated. Although i understand why people use them because of the rich brush’s and such i still prefer the Mashable Vector graphics flash gives even if its not the classical Vector icon making program.

The second phase or sometimes the first is to decide on colors, Style and prespective, Alot of people paint every icon on its own, I on the other hand paint all of them on the same “Stage” thats how i can decide on prespective and see that they all “Speak” the same language. Probably everybody knows these technics but i still enjoy telling how i make magic happen.

Other then that I found that After painting the Object i move it to photoshop for final touchs to give it a nice finish with highlights and shadows to make the object feel more realistic, Although you might want to keep the vector clean style and thats ok also.

But the reason i’m writing this short post is because alot of people think making icons is a simple task when its really not, Making art on a 64×64 and reduce it to 16×16 and still keep the elements you want visible without disappearing is pretty hard especialy if your designing for a “Icon Only” language so you need to transfer the Icon Purpose like a comedian got his 15 minutes of open mic night you got only one chance to explain the end user the meaning of the icon and that takes alot of work. So please people out there, Dont diss Icon makers ! its a gruling task making them icons…