Hey geeks,
Since two weeks I am doing a summerjob in the company called Televic Education. They are specialised in webtools and Desktop applications concerning education. I found the job via an online advertisement and applied immediatly. They needed two students to analyze and complete the design for there applications. Kjelle my colleague is working on a online webtool called edumatic while I am working on Avidanet.
Info about Avidanet 350 (current software solution)
“The AVIDAnet® is a 100% interactive teaching software that makes teaching enjoyable at all levels.
It can be used for any subject where web and multimedia resources have to bring an added
value to learning or where control and management of the teacher is needed.”
Ok that’s enough background for now!
My task in this project is to define the visual look and feel of the application and create all the icons that would be used in the application. It is a great oppurtunity for me to work for this company and I love it from the first minute.
After the creation of the UI for Avidanet It was time to start creating the icons. Icon design was totally new to me and so I found it a big challenge to create useful, orginal and good looking icons for their application.
Ofcourse the first step is to take a blank sheet and a pencil and start writing ideas down and making quick sketches. But before I started sketching and thinking about concepts I did some research and read some interesting articles about icon design.
A very interesting thing to do if you start something is knowing how not to do it… that’s why I really suggest to read the article about the 10 Mistakes in Icon Design .
The most important things that I filtered out of this article were:
- Think about different traditions in countries across the world, if you creating a application which is going to be used world wide
- Keep it simple
- Do not put more info into your icon as needed
- Choose for icons with perspective or icons without perspective. Do not combine both!
- Think about an orginal concept for the icon set. And create your own style
- Be careful with using shadows and glows. (It’s better to use none of both).
After reading the article you probally need inspiration for the icon set. That’s where iconfinder comes in. Icon finder is a great new web 2.0 tool which makes it very easy to find and navigate through icons and icon set. Ideal if you need inspiration like i did.
If you have found the icon which you need, you are free to download it! That’s right it’s free. You can choose which format you want, the possible download formats are PNG and ICO.
After you finished all these steps you are able to create an icon in a tool of your own preference. Personally I use illustrator to create icons but that’s your own choice! I you are creating icons for WPF applications there is also the choise to create them in Expression Blend.
Ok folks, that’s it for now! In a couple of days I am going to post the design process for the icon set that I am creating at work. Hope you enjoyed the article and learned something new today.
Also interesting reads:
Lode is a Creative-Geek with passion for Graphic design , he is also into the web programming "stuff" like Adobe Flash,air and Flex . Lode loves to learn and loves to share knowledge with others.Follow Lode on http://twitter.com/stealfish
It depends on the way you look at it and where you might be coming from on the theme really. Ultimately beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I am with you on this one.