Icon Design for Software Programs
Embellish
Airbrush icon, dadaware Inc. |
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The icons below form all of the
user interface buttons, file icons and the main program icon
for a program called Embellish, created by dadaware, Inc.
as a freelance project of mine. It was necessary for me to
keep within a rigid color pallette of two reds, two greens,
two yellows/browns, four black colors and white for the user
interface icons, as well as keeping within a square of 32
pixels on each side. The detail at the right shows how I accomplished
this, using alternating pixels to creat an illusion of shadows
and highlights in different colors of the limited pallette
in which I needed to stay.Communicating
with the customer by fax, I used sketches to show my ideas
and work out a design for each icon with their input. These
icons are now a part of the Embellish program, which can be
seen at www.dadaware.com.
File format icons
     
Program icons
   
  
Drawing tool icons
   
    
    
  
 
 
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Copy / Clone / Move icons
   
Color Operation icons
  
  
Selection, Scale and Special Effect icons
    
  
 
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Icon Design for Windows
New
Zip file detail, from Quake II. |
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Sometimes I get bored with the icons on
my operating system, and I like to change them once in a while.
The following are a sample of the
icons I've created for myself, taking images from games such
as Quake II, Riven,from 3d computer renders I've made in the
past, and even labels off of microbrew beer bottles like Sam
Adams. After reducing the images in pixels size, I reduce
them by pixel depth (256 colors) so that my computer doesn't
waste time rendering colors I'd never see without a magnifying
glass, choose the area of the icon that will be transparent,
and save the resulting image in an icon format.
These icons were much easier to create, because I could use
any combination of 256 colors that I wanted, making my own
color pallette with Adobe Photoshop's ability to save color
swatches for use in other programs.
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