Making an App Icon
My first thought for this video:
I will look for references here:
- CollectUI
- Smashing Magazine: Icons As Part Of A Great User Experience
- Nielsen Norman Group: Icon Usability and Usability testing on icons. He says: “Icons must first and foremost communicate meaning in a graphic user interface. Icons are, by definition a visual representation of an object, action or an idea. If that object, action or idea is not immediately clear to users, the icon is reduced to mere eye candy — confusing, frustrating, eye candy — and to visual noise that hinders people from completing a task.”
- App Icon on Pinterest
- Icon design done right — Ewout van Lambalgen
How should an Icon be? It should be simple, innovative, recognizable, homogeneus, must have bounding boxes, must work in really big and small sizes, easy to design with, easy to code with, should have labels.
I´m focusing on the creative side, for the technical part I strongly recommend these posts:
First I though about doing something with Fibonacci golden spiral, so I compiled some good screenshots, there is one repeated, did you discover it? Then I thought about logos and playing with shadows, circles, letters, folds, cubes, color. I worked for national attorney about fifteen years ago, and used to make logos. I was really a nice job, I could be working on a logo for one month.
Also there´s a trend I like, is working with .svg and responsive logos, you will understand easily this if you open http://responsivelogos.co.uk/ site and change your window width manually.
I won´t do any sketching here as it is faster working on a computer. But I´ll make something like thinking in the attributes of the concepts. Say I want to make four icons: One for a Beer trademark, other for a game, one more for a running app and last one for a photo gallery.
For the Beer: Using KISS methodology, just keep it simple, I wanted to draw a pitcher or beer glass with foam, once it has color it´s clear, in black and white could be a cup of coffee.
For the game: Don´t have a naming for this yet. Looks like a lemming or a butterfly, neutral and friendly, static but with the ability to fly.
For the Running App (voice guided): Initially it was going to be called Runway but I changed the name to Runwave as it will be a Voice guided App for runners (a Siri for runners to understand it better). I think it is a challenge to design something for voice interfaces. Voice assistants are a trend.
For the Social Photo site: I had some concepts here. First of all I wanted to work with Fibonacci golden spiral, so here you can see the result. Second, I was not sure what kind of bird this was. I was thinking of a Tucan but a parrot could be better. Actually Mondrianizm is a Dribbble Trend, so I used Mondrian colors that surprisingly are similar to a parrot color. I wonder if Mondrian had a parrot to get color inspiration, but he didn´t as far as I know.
Did this for the Daily UI Design Challenge #005 App Icon.
