by Justas | Jan 26, 2016 | Articles
What are responsive icons?! You might wonder. Although the responsive web is an absolute norm right now and the first responsive icons appeared a couple of years ago, not everybody knows what they are. The fact that they are not so widely spread these days raises a few questions. Are they really necessary? Do they provide good user experience? In today’s article we will analyze pros and cons of such icons, as well as what you should have in mind when creating them. What are responsive icons? First things first, responsive icons, just like the responsive web, react and change depending on what screen size you’re using to look at them. To put it simple, it’s a set of usually 2 to 4 different variations of the same icon. Basically, what changes is the amount of details used in the icon. When your screen gets smaller, the icon loses some of its details. But why are responsive icons so important? Everyone who has designed at least a few icons in their career knows that if the icon looks good on 128px grid, it won’t always look as good on 32px. It requires a lot of skill to create an icon that will look equally good in different sizes and will still deliver the message clearly. And this is where the responsive icons step in. You take one icon and create different variations of it to look good in different resolutions. So, implementing responsive icons is a little bit like cheating to make them look good in different resolutions and screen sizes. The best way to understand how they work...
by Justas | Jan 19, 2016 | Articles
Grids, oh, mighty grids! I think this is the most requested article of all times. And yet, in my opinion, grids are overrated. Yep, I said this. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes a great grid is the essential part of a wonderful icon set, but it’s definitely not a necessity. I’m getting a lot of emails from people that haven’t started their first icon set just because they don’t know how to set up a grid. Oh, come on! Let me tell you a secret: you don’t really need a grid for your first icon set. It’s a great practice to create some icons on the grid, but before even thinking about creating your own grid you should make thousands of icons to understand what to take into consideration while making the grid. So what is icon grid exactly? Icon grid is most commonly created using the guidelines placed precisely on the artboard. But it is not just about the guidelines, of course. Think of an icon grid as a set of rules made to keep consistency throughout the icon set. Well laid out structure where your icon set is going to be constructed. People often confuse construction guidelines with icon grids. I’m talking about the guidelines other designers show in their works to demonstrate the process or thoughts behind a certain icon. I think people are obsessed about knowing what is going on behind the scenes of other people’s works. That is why when you put up a work with visible guidelines, it will most likely get more attention than the exact same work but without the guidelines....
by Justas | Jan 15, 2016 | Inspiration
Hey guys! How are you doing? Once again I present you collection of great icons and icon sets. It’s nice to see so many different styles and interesting approaches on icon design. I’m sure you will discover some great icon designers and awesome icon sets....
by Justas | Jan 12, 2016 | Articles
Recently, I came across a very fascinating urban legend about Ernest Hemingway. While spending time in a bar, he bet his friends 10 bucks that he could write a six-word poem that would make readers cry. Hemingway came up with this: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” No need to say he won the bet. There is another great story written by Frederic Brown in 1948: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…” This genre is called Flash Fiction. It really strikes me how much meaning can be put into just a couple of words. It is breathtaking that the whole story with climax and epilogue fits into a sentence or two. Everything is cut to essentials and thought through — there is no room for anything excessive. This looks a lot like creating icons. Little pictograms that hold an enormous message. This is one of the main differences between an illustration and an icon. Illustrations are like 500 word poems, while icons remind the aforenamed 6 word flash fiction. Emphasising what truly matters and removing everything unnecessary to pass along the message may be a difficult task. Some icons should look super simple, and simple isn’t easy. So, how do you know what’s the right amount of details you can use for one icon? It was the writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery who once said, “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”. The smaller the icon is, the fewer details it needs. Icons that are made...
by Justas | Jan 8, 2016 | Inspiration
Hey guys! How are you doing? Once again I present you collection of great icons and icon sets. It’s nice to see so many different styles and interesting approaches on icon design. I’m sure you will discover some great icon designers and awesome icon sets....
