Monday, 22 February 2010

Designing The Icon With Perfection

Don't design in isolation: It’s vital to design icons in context and in company. Creating them in isolation from each other and their surroundings can result in inconsistency and a poor fit. When I was redesigning the Mail side panel icons for Opera 10, I set them all up together in one image, I started off with a screenshot of the context (the Mail Panel) on one layer, then created the icons in their natural order on another.

In some cases, it’s good for icons with similar functions to use the same basis (inbox and outbox for example) to aid understanding, whereas in other situations, they need to be clearly different. Creating icons in this way, rather than on 40 separate 16x16px canvas, ensures they work together. Whatever size you’re working at, when creating icons to be viewed on screen, the placement of every pixel matters. Zoom in close to Last.fm’s favicon for example, and you can see how the pixels have been carefully chosen. The borders and the ‘as’ logotype align crisply on the pixel grid, with restrained antialiasing helping to smooth the curves. It’s surprising how many icons I’ve seen that don’t bother aligning to pixels and the result links blurred. Generally, any smaller than 16px and you should avid antialiasing altogether. The style is up to you, as is the size/context. Read more about the designing and related information in the dotnet magazine you will find really good information there. I read this above information in the same magazine and sharing with you dotnet magazine is really good to read.

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