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7 Principles of Effective Icon Design

Before approaching icon design there are some guidelines and principles that are worth studying. If you want to create effective icon designs, then you should take a holistic approach to issues such as: audience, size, simplicity, lighting, perspective, and style. This article gives you a good starting place for creating icons that work well together and fit seamlessly within your designs.

1. Approach Icon Design Holistically

Icons fit within graphic systems. Whether they are designed for desktop applications or websites an icon is one of many graphic elements that need to work together harmonically. Carry this logic across icon sets as well. Icons can be appreciated for their esthetic solutions individually, but they don’t function alone. Evaluate your icon designs relative to the graphic system your using them in. Make sure that each icon differs from surrounding icons, while still working together as a whole. In the article Designing an iconic language over at Turbo Milk the author Yegor Gilyov states, “If you need to draw several icons, you need to think over images for the whole set of icons before proceeding with illustrating activities.” This is one of two major points made in this article on icon design. He goes on to explain how failing to plan how the whole set of icons will work together from the beginning will ensure a huge waste of time, as redesign will be inevitable. Read more

Pikaboo new website

We are launching a new website. We wanted a simple and efficient website. Using mootools, flickr and twitter and quicktime !

La Bamboo ; New XML Blogger Template

Temporary Demo Blog | Download Page

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Addons for Designers

These 10 essential Firefox addons will make your life as a graphic and web designer much easier!

Enhance Your Image with Selective Color Adjustments

In this tutorial I will show you a non-destructive process for color editing and retouching photographs. These techniques will make your images “finished” and professional. My main weapon is the Selective Color Adjustment Layer. Let’s get started.

Step 1

Below is our starting image of a couple on a beach. We also need to download a photo of a beach that we’ll use to improve the water and sky in the base image. We’ll see this second image later in this tutorial and in the PSD download available for Plus members. Here are the links to the images we’ll be using for this tutorial: 1 | 2. Read more

60 WP Blog Design

60 Creatively unusual WordPress blog designs that are a little bit more distinctive from the regular ones.

Pinkle ; New XML Blogger Template

Live Demo | Download Page

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Create a Cool Music Logo on a Grunge Background

I really like the artwork that is used in Pitchfork’s website; So, I decided to re-create something similar in Photoshop, and make a tutorial on how I did it. These techniques can be used to make a logo and background for a cool grunge style website.

Step 1

Make a new document that is 1500px wide and 1000 px height. I decided to make the document extra large for use to work with; So, we can see the effects really well. With the Text tool set your text in a font that looks similar to the image below. I used the font Blackoak STD. Kern and scale the font as you desire. Read more

E-commerce with WP!

Easily turn wordpress into an e-commerce solution. As someone who has used WP-ecommerce in the past, this was a lot easier!

Sweet Orange WP Theme

Two column theme with a clean and simple style, add your own header and it’s like brand new.

(more…)

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