My brand-new stock icon set, Swift is now available. This set includes scalable vector files so you can make the icons as big as you want without ever loosing quality. Swift includes 90 icons in BMP, GIF, ICNS, ICO, PDF, and PNG formats. The bitmap icons include sizes from 16×16 pixels to 512×512 pixels. You can take a look at our Stock Icon Page for a preview and you can purchase the set there too.

So this is the new website for Icon Icon. The new look coincides with an expansion of the design services we are offering. We are now offering illustration, web design, print design, identity and logo design.

Send us an email, IM, or phone
call to discuss details and get
a quote.

I got my invite to Netvibes Ginger on Tuesday, January 22nd. Boy was I excited! I’ve been a netvibes user for over a year and use it all the time. I’ve tried several start-pages including iGoogle, Schmedley, and Goowy. None of them have the features and style of Netvibes. I find Netvibes to be customizable, quick, and has lots of widgets.

So, when I got my invite code to Netvibes’ Ginger release I typed it in as fast as I could and was informed that I would be migrated to Ginger in a few minutes. A day later I was still waiting. Netvibes servers were being beaten quite brutally by so many eager users that they had to shut down for a bit. I was disappointed and worried that Netvibes had gone wrong. That this was going to be a slower, buggier version of the start-page I had grown to love. Thankfully this didn’t turn out to be the case.

On Wednesday evening I went to netvibes and was happy to finally see that i was ready to migrate to Ginger. I had to enter some personal information (I would have been much happier if they didn’t ask that) – name, date of birth, stuff like that. No big deal ( i guess :-\). After that Ginger loaded up and I got started. So here’s the good and the bad and the ugly ( this is a graphics blog after all :-p)

The Good.

1) It’s still snappy.
2) Very customizable.
3) The new interface for adding rss feeds and widgets is well designed, adding nice visual navigation in the same window and it gets out of the way when you’re done.
4) The look. From a design standpoint there are nice visual things happening in Ginger the New Ginger and Garlic themes are both visually pleasing and help to aide the eye as it moves across the page. Again, the new “add content” interface is visually pleasing with a dark gray background and well organized grids of new content for you to add. As usual netvibes add a small shiny areas of bright color to break up the subtle tones that make up most of the interface. Well done!
5) Universe? I guess Netvibes Universes fits into the “good” category even though I’m not that excited about it. Universe is your public netvibes page. it allows you to post a collection of feeds, stories, and widgets that others can see. It’s an attempt to make Netvibes fully Web 2.0 compliant by adding social networks. For me this is unnecessary. I come to Netvibes to keep up with the news and organize my thoughts – not to meet with friends. Besides, I’m already on Digg, Facebook, and Orkut. Why does Netvibes need to be social? Anyway, this may just be me and as far as I can see it’s not interfering with my regular Netvibes usage. I guess you could just not use it if you didn’t want to.

The Bad.

1) Still a little buggy. There are some glitches while adding and moving widgets. I just added Webnote and it disappeared as soon as it was added it to the page. Tried again and it worked. But i tried to move it and it duplicated the widget. I hope that Netvibes isn’t too distracted working on Universe to fix these problems. Also, I have to mention the long wait before my account was migrated to Ginger again. Excusable but it did take a whole day.

The Ugly.

1) Honestly, I must say this is a very nice looking release. Graphically it’s among the best looking web 2.0 sites. Solid design with a few embellishments rather than over the top glitz. Obviously, one could make it as ugly as she or he wanted but that just goes to show how customizable Netvibes is.

While I can still imagine improvements to Netvibes, this release has brought much to Netvibes users and fairly quickly too. If you are a Netvibes user you will enjoy the upgrade.

Our brand-new stock icon set, Chickadee is now available. You can take a look at our Stock Icon Page for a preview and you can purchase the set there too.

However, I wasn’t waiting to buy the iPhone, I just wanted to see it. You see, I’ve been working on the graphics for an iPhone app called iScopes. It’s a joint effort between Astrology.com and Day Late and Dollar Short Software. iScopes lets you find your horoscope right on your iPhone, with a beautiful and fun interface. After a week of guessing at the actual dimensions of the display area, trying different interface ideas, and imagining using the app on this amazing device, I just had to see it in person. And I wasn’t disappointed. Thanks to the expert programming of Don McConnell at Day Late and Dollar Short Software and the amazing work that Apple did, everything worked even better than expected. And my graphics didn’t look half bad either . But holding the device in your hand makes is simply addictive. I can see why 500,000 people bought it last weekend. Apple sold 700,000 iPhone made $200m+ Profit (update 7/6/07).

iScopes is just one of the many cool apps for the iPhone. You can find many more at iPhone Application List (best for browser) or iPhone Apps Manager (best for iPhone). You can find apps to help you find cheap gas, to organize your Del.icio.us bookmarks, find movie times, play games, and lots of other stuff too.

Designing iPhone apps has it’s own set of issues and considerations. Firstly, The iPhone’s screen resolution is 160ppi, over double that of most computer monitors so, whatever you see on your computer screen is over twice as big as it will be on the iPhone. Second, you navigate with your fingers on the iPhone, not a mouse so, all the links and buttons need to be designed with that in mind. Third, when you rotate the iPhone the app need to switch from portrait (vertically oriented display) to landscape (horizontally oriented display) so, you need to design both views. All in all it is not drastically different but the differences are key.

Now that the iPhone has been released it will be easier to design for it. This is an area I hope to be doing a lot of work in. The possibilities of iPhone apps is limited only by the imagination and I expect we will see some amazing things on the iPhone in the coming months.

Update 7/6/07 – Apple has posted development guidelines for iPhone web apps.

Steve Jobs is set to discuss Leopard, Apple‘s new operating system at WWDC next Tuesday, June 12th, at which time the “top secret” features will be revealed. All signs point to a complete interface overhaul, hopefully including the out-dated finder.

Icon and interface designers will be especially interested in what Jobs has to say as it will directly affect how we work. I am excited about the new possibilities but also a eager to find out exactly what the changes are. Some questions I hope are answered are: Will I have to re-create all my icons as vector graphics? Will the older icons even work in Leopard? Will there be animated icons (please please please)?

It is an exciting time to be a Mac user!

Thanks to Junichi Kodaira from Mac Fan Magazine in Japan for publishing our Paper Docs icons. This is the second time we’ve been been published in Mac Fan. You can check out their website at: http://macfan.jp/. It looks like a really cool magazine with lots of resources for Mac users. I just wish I could read Japanese.

detail with our Paper Docs icons from page 110 ]]> http://iconicon.net/?feed=rss2&p=43 0 http://iconicon.net/?p=38 http://iconicon.net/?p=38#comments Fri, 25 May 2007 14:59:39 +0000 http://iconicon.net/talktalk/?p=48

Leslie Franke has published this really great css reference. The CSS cheat sheet is a very handy way to quickly look up the basic CSS stuff. enjoy!

The participants are:

Dave Brasgalla (Icon Factory)
Brian Brasher (Firewheel Design)
Jon Hicks (Hicks Design)
Corey Marion (Icon Factory)
Michael Schmidt (Cuban Council)
Josh Williams (Firewheel Design)
(Moderated by Matt and Jason from 37signals)

So far the discussion has covered favorite design software, historical icons, and a bit about each artists design processes. It’s a good read.

Link: part 1, part 2.

“The most obvious visual change in the newest build is a shift away from “Brushed Metal” which Apple uses in many applications such as Safari and Finder.”

–Mac Rumors

Additional screenshots here.

To my eyes these look suspiciously like UNO, the theme for Mac OS X by Interacto.net. Take a look and tell me what you think. UNO has a simple, beautiful and elegant look. Apple would be smart to take a page from their book. UNO would be a vast improvement over the mis-matched windows in Tiger (especially brushed metal in my opinion). UNO is FREE and easy to install and uninstall.