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#INKSCAPE FREE FOR MAC HOW TO#
#INKSCAPE FREE FOR MAC MAC OS X#
#INKSCAPE FREE FOR MAC SOFTWARE#
#INKSCAPE FREE FOR MAC WINDOWS 7#

A bright gradient or colorburst in the background.

The iPhone has a style that is distinct from the Mac:Īside from the obvious round cornered background and top-down gloss effect, iPhone icons tend to use: Of course, none of these are immutable but following them will make it easier to create a simple icon that looks like it belongs on the Mac.

Are self-edged and have almost no internal lines (the outline of the icon is sometimes edged for contrast).

Indicate their function or concept with an overlayed or nested element.

Use a generally bright but slightly desaturated palette of grays, azure blues, desaturated reds and sandy yellows (utility apps tend to use more blacks and darker colors).

Use soft gradients, sometimes (but not always) with a light gloss or highlight.

Have approximately the same weight (fill roughly the same amount of their visual area).

In addition to these three categories, the icons tend to: Originally, Apple had the guideline that utilities should look like they were "items sitting on a shelf" but only the disk utitilies still follow that guideline.

Utilities (orthogonal rectangular background).

Appliance applications (round - or at least non-rectangular - background).

Document applications (rectangular background angled 5-10° left).

#INKSCAPE FREE FOR MAC MAC OS X#

Ignoring the "Finder" icon (which is actually the "Mac OS" icon and predates Mac OS X by about 5 years), these icons come in three distinct styles: Icon styles on the Macīy contrast, icons on the Mac tend to have more in common: They share no obvious visual style they are all drawn with different perspective, they all have different weights, some are glossy while others are matte, some have line edges while others are self-edged (no lines) and they don't share a color palette.

#INKSCAPE FREE FOR MAC WINDOWS 7#

These are the first four icons that a Windows 7 user sees and they are the strangest collection of graphics I've ever seen. I continue to be surprised when I look at screenshots of the Windows 7 taskbar. In addition to detailing iPhone icon creation, the second part will also cover basic Mac icon design.

#INKSCAPE FREE FOR MAC SOFTWARE#

Created using free software as non-professional artists don't always have access to Photoshop.

Rounded corners and gloss are applied to a separate clone of the base artwork so the submission to Apple can be non-prerendered if you choose.

Entirely vector artwork, so it will scale from 57x57 pixels up to 512x512 pixels as required for App Store submissions.

This alternative approach has the following advantages: I wanted to show an alternative approach to the one suggested in that article. This post is partly a response to Elite By Design's "Design The iTunes Icon For The iPhone And iPod Touch" which produced an iTunes-style icon at 125x125 pixels in Photoshop.

#INKSCAPE FREE FOR MAC HOW TO#

The goal of this series is to show non-graphics professionals how to create graphics of an acceptable level for their applications that follow the established visual trends for iPhone and Mac apps. While larger development teams have dedicated graphic artists to create icons and other artwork assets, the reality is that on smaller teams or on solo projects, a programmer may need to create icons themselves. It may seem strange to be covering icon creation in a Cocoa programming blog but the icon is an important part of an application and Cocoa is primarily an application programming environment. The remaining four will be covered in the second part. Only the first icon will be created in this part. This series will cover the creation of the following different icons: In this first part, I'll talk about the common styles and traits of icons on the Mac and iPhone and give a step-by-step guide to creating the first iPhone icon in Inkscape. In this two part series, I'll give a beginner's guide to creating iPhone and Mac application icons using Inkscape - a free, vector illustration program.