So I really hate icon design. I work in odd sizes for a spe­cific project and I didn’t cre­ate the orig­i­nals, so they aren’t my style. I have to mimic another artists work and that’s a pain in the arse. I will say that I am learn­ing a ton about sketch­ing and it’s impor­tance and about pixel draw­ings and the ben­e­fits of pixel over vec­tor etc. How’s about we chat about that?

Icon from He[double hockey sticks]

So I was tasked with cre­at­ing an icon that can be used in our nav­i­ga­tion bar, that sig­ni­fies brows­ing global con­tent within the app(documents, dis­cus­sions, polls, etc). Here’s what I man­aged to come up with:

Note: All the work I do at work is the prop­erty of my par­ent corp. so please do not use any of these icons for any use.

I started out with a basic draw­ing that embod­ied the con­tent I wanted to include in the icon. Then went through sev­eral vari­a­tions, mod­ern­iz­ing and clean­ing it up. For­merly, I cre­ated icons in Illus­tra­tor, then would resize the vec­tor graphic whichever way it was needed; but after read­ing a post from Firewheel Design, I wanted to try my hand at bitmap paint­ing. It’s tougher…each gra­di­ent is hand done, edges have to be invented, and differentiation(especially at such a small size) is quite a chal­lenge. But again, try try again, you’ll never get it till you try. I think I did well here to indi­cate mul­ti­ple pieces of paper in a 3D style folder. What do you think?

Here is how it looks in use in the web app:

Process

So you can tell right away here, I’m no Rem­brandt. Not even late Picasso. I’m also kind of dis­or­ga­nized. Just con­sider your­selves lucky I don’t attempt to use my Wacom tablet…ever. Sketch­ing, is very impor­tant to get your ideas down, dis­sem­i­nate what’s good and what’s bad, what will work and what won’t work. Play (our favorite[?] buzz­word!), is so impor­tant to mak­ing a design hap­pen. I do a lot of word asso­ci­a­tion to start, in order to help look at a prob­lem from a dif­fer­ent posi­tion. I won’t go any­more into the sketch­ing process because so many have dis­cussed it bet­ter and more ele­gantly than I could and I want them to get some credit too, so go read these articles!

• Fuel Your Creativity
• Design Informer
• Cre­ative Bits
• Go Media Zine
• Paddy Don­nelly- Paddy talks about doo­dling in a dif­fer­ent aspect but his posts are fan­tas­tic and you should read­ing his stuff.)

Please leave some com­ments, I can’t talk much more to this work. So here’s a piece of zen:

Chris Trude

Chris is a twitter-head, blog­ger, and web/graphic designer by night, and an in-house graphic designer by day. Also hap­pens to be an avid prac­ti­tioner of awe­some­ness. Feel free to sub­scribe to my feed, or fol­low me on Twit­ter to keep in touch with my day to day.