Icon design

[francis]

Pretty good MSDN article on designing icons (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwxp/html/winxpicons.asp), something that I'd love to be good at, but don't have the patience!

[francis]

A couple more articles on icon design. Firstly by the rather talented Dan Cederholm (http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2004/08/23/anatomy.html) and then an article by Hicksdesign on the rather spiffing Thunderbird icon (http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/439/thunderbird).

[David]

Good links Francis. I think the SimpleBits website (http://www.simplebits.com/) is very beautiful indeed. One I'd like to keep as a "touchstone" for future work. The golbal nav bar does generate some peculiar effects in IE but works fine in Moz - I'm minded to overlook this, however, because graphically it's fab. B)

[francis]

One big phat link of bullets (http://www.stylegala.com/archive/bulletmadness/). Click bullet-name link, right-click image, copy, paste into image editor, zoom to max, find out how they did it.

This is post 666. Spooky

[David]

Excellent resource - I'll have to nab some of those - may come in very handy.

Well, how did they do it? :)

[francis]

It's a case of zoom in massively, play with the Photoshop pencil tool, zoom out, check, alter, zoom in, amend, zoom out, save for web, check, zoom in, alter, zoom out, check, save for web, repeat ad nauseum until you're finally happy. Then repeat the entire process until you're sure you're happy/completely sick of the stupid 10px by 10px thing!

[francis]

The W3C is approaching its 10 year anniversary and they've approached someone to possibly redesign their logo (http://www.designbyfire.com/000146.html). Whether or not it is used, the article is quite informative and worth a read. Oh, and what does anyone think of the finished item?

[David]

Hmm. I always thought the original logo rather uninspiring and the new proposed logo is no different in that respect.

Having just read Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web, it strikes me as rather missing the point to use a bit of code as a "seed" for the design. TB-L's ideas for the Web and the Consortium are much bigger than just code. He envisions social and political change - now there's inspiration for a logo.

[francis]

Weaving The Web is a good book. If you haven't read it, 'where wizards stay up late, the origins of the internet' is a good read.

The W3C's site design is fairly iffy, especially when you look at something like the CSS2 specs (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/). I mean, really...