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What is your process for creating application icons?
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I almost always start in Illustrator. If I’ve found some reference images to look at, I place them in the bottom layer (locked) so that everything is in the same artboard. I turn on the grid and in the view menu I set it to pixel preview and enable snap to pixel. When creating icons at different perspectives, I often use the basic 3-D tools in Illustrator to get the angle and perspective looking right. They’re not great for anything advanced, but do help when starting work on an icon to get the perspective looking correct. Once I’m happy, I’ll expand the shape and continue working with it, adding colours, highlights, and so on. Once you’ve expanded a 3-D object in Illustrator, it usually adds lots of points to the shapes which seems pretty messy. In the past I would often leave the shapes with all the messy points, but lately I use a tool from the VectorScribe plug-in called ‘smart remove point and close path’ (from the plug-in’s PathScribe palette). It’s really easy to select and remove all those points while keeping the original shape intact to clean up the objects. I make the basic shapes with flat contrasting colours so that they’re easy to distinguish while arranging them. Once the icon starts to resemble the image I have of it in my head, I start adding the intended colours, highlights and shadows. I often duplicate the icon, making changes and comparing the old and new versions side by side to see which works best. I keep on duplicating them throughout the process, comparing different variations all the time. Once I’m getting to the point where I’ve made all of the shapes, added some colours and effects and it’s looking like something I’m happy with (probably about 80% completed), I save it as a new Illustrator document and delete all the old versions so that I just have one version to continue with. I’ll then carry on tweaking, trying different colours, sizes of objects and such like. I often add shadows and other effects to the larger sizes in Illustrator, but it doesn’t handle blur, inner glow and some others well at smaller sizes (usually below 128px). If this is the case, I then switch to Photoshop to tweak them and finish them off there.