Rockstar Icon Designer - Kate McInnes [49]
Viewing Angles Used: There are three main viewing styles for Macintosh icons: Desk View, Shelf View and Front View. There's an in-depth guide for each of these in the "View Points" and "Perspective" chapters of this book. The general rule to follow when choosing a viewing angle for your icon is simple: Utility icons are viewed from the front, Application icons are shown to look like they're resting on a desk that the viewer is looking down on, and Toolbar icons should look like they're resting on a shelf that is eye level with the viewer.
Icon Design for Mac OS and iOS
If you're creating an icon for iPhone, iPod and Mac OS you will need to create two different designs. One that uses the square format of the touch screen icons and another that is a desktop style icon. While the visual style of Mac OS has some overlap with iOS, the application icons provide immediate visual feedback for the platform they're intended for. If a user is presented with two icons, one square and the other based on an object, they will immediately know the square one is from a device based app and the object one is from a desktop based app. It's also important to relate the two icons together with shared design elements and color scheme.
Light Source: All icons have a light source above and slightly to the front of the item. 16px icons and sidebar icons have no drop shadow. Drop reflections are dynamically generated by the OS, so there is no need to include one in your design.
Format: ICNS, PDF, JPG2000
iOS
Background
Despite their seemingly simple appearance, icons for iPhone and iPad ( collectively called iOS devices) have become an art form for many contemporary icon designers. Based on a central theme of pictographic icons for Toolbars and actions and rounded squares for the Application icons, there's more to iOS icons than many people perceive. First off, the rounded corners and reflections on the application icons are applied in the OS, if you intend on applying your own reflection or special effects you will need to disable the reflection in the application itself. Secondly, the application icon has to come in a variety of sizes so it can be viewed on the App store and in searches when the device is linked to a computer. One last thing to take note of is the resolution differences between iPhone 4 and above and iPod Touch and iPhone 3. If you're creating an App for all three devices, you will need to take special care in supplying the various scales required to show the icons in both the regular resolution screens and the retina display screens. Let's take a closer look at the technical requirements of an iOS icon.
iOS icons by Nikola Adzic (vector.tutsplus.com/tutorials/icon-design/create-a-detailed-vector-based-iphone-illustration-part-2).
Style
Apple has a set of icon guidelines for iOS, which can be found in the iOS Developer Library. While it's fairly open when it comes to artistic style, there are still a few considerations to be made in regards to scale and technical requirements. Let's begin with the recommended art style.
First the icons should follow the general guidelines for all successful icon designs and be crisp, uncluttered and related to the application. Represent one concept or feature from the application on the icon and draw the basic elements in a way that's easy to distinguish at the smallest scales. This means you should avoid including text and small details that are important to the meaning of the design but leave room to add details such as texture and lighting effects for the larger scales. The application will have to be rendered as large as 512px for the App Store listing and as small as 57px for the regular sized application icon, so the best way to approach the design is to make the main body of the design in vector shapes, and make design tweaks to optimize the design for each size.
With thousands of applications being submitted to the App Store, it was hard for Apple to devote the resources needed for quality control of icons. Therefore Apple