Basicly it boils down to pixel to pixel ratio when you scale your art down. Say a 8px line your 512×512 icon down to a 64 x 64 px icon. What happens is, that your 8px line becomes 1px wide in the 32px version. That’s pretty straightforward. Scaling it further down, say to 16 x 16px you will get a pretty muddy result, as your 8px line, now has to be divided by 2 again.  

The thing is, if you made your initial document right, it’s pretty easy to get past this problem. What you do is, that you increase your layer-styles sizes with the the multiplier you scale down. So, if you have 1px outline, and you want that outline to stand out when you scale down, you just multiply it with the amount of times you scale you illustration down. 1px in 512x512px becomes, 1px in 32x32px if you make it 8px wide in the high resolution.

This doesn’t always work though – but a lot of times it will.

Another good idea is to keep a grid in the background of your artwork, for pixel position reference. Attached in the PSD you will find a 8x8px grid file – which you can make into a pattern, and apply to your backgrounds; this works perfectly with your 512x512px document  

There are several ways to achieve a nice wood effect, but the one I am going to show you is pretty easy. The hardest thing is to get some good reference material, and to make you texture tile right. But if you have any suggestions for improvement, please tell me

In the zip file you will find a file called wood-texture with 3 layers. The first layer is the original reference picture, cropped to a interesting area. After cropping it you need to desaturate it (Shift + Alt + U). When this step is done, we need to make the wood tile-able. To do this go into Filter > Other > Offset – and offset the picture both on the x- and y-axis. Now you should clearly see the seam. The easiest way of  getting rid of the tiling, is to sample some pixels from the nearby areas with your stamp tool – until you have something like the last layer in the file. When you are done, simply select all, and go into Edit > Define Pattern, and type in the name of your pattern.

If you take a look at the file woodflat.psd – you can see the pattern applied, among other layer styles. 

And here’s another small example of what you can quickly put together using the same techniques.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them as a comment.

In this case Illustrator is a real dealbreaker if you want to get the perspective right. Illustrator has this nice 3D Extrude & Bevel effect, which is perfect for this specific task of creating depth to a complex object. Look at the example below. Times new roman, 3D Extrude & Bevel effect – and you got your starting point for your vectors for photoshop

Check out the rest in the PSD file – and give me a poke with a stick if you want any further details on the creation process

So, now I decided to make revisited release of the Polaroid illustration. Basically it’s made from scratch again, and I added some minor tweaks to it as well. The PSD includes two versions, a slanted one and a straight one. I also added some adjustmentlayers, which ofcourse can be turned on / off.

I hope you enjoy the re-release of Polaroid. (Download PSD file)

Free for personal use as usual (please remember to credit me, and add a small link to my blog). For any commercial use please contact me.

For the ones who like to play around with other peoples PSD files, here one for the NES controller.