Icon designer Kevin Andersson

When designing icons you will often have to make them avaliable in different sizes. Usually 512×512, 256×256, 128×128, 64×64, 32×32 and so on. Scaling your icons from 512×512 to 256×256 is often ok, but as soon as you go into the really small sizes you get into trouble. Your high resolution details just won’t work on the low-resolution versions. So, here’s a quick tip on how to make your smaller sizes look a tad more crisp. 

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  

So I kinda promised a couple of people from MacThemes to show my take on how to make wood in photoshop. 

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.

I really really adore Jonas Rask new iconset PRY. After looking though the icons tonight, one of the icons really caught my eye. Jonas take on the fonts icon is really slick, so I decided to figure out how he made it. 

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

Hello everyone. Now I’m back to business, and got myself a bit of free time at nights again. Some wicked Rock Band devil had gotten into me over my holidays, so I havn’t been that active theming

But no need to dispair – Now I am back. I fiddled a bit around with the mobile me theme tonight, as I figured I was missing a lot of stuff. A lot of interesting things will happen with the theme. For starters I was lucky to pre-beta test Architect, which is a upcoming killer application for theming OS X Leopard. Have an eye open for the public beta release this sunday! But anyways, that made me put the theme a bit on hold, because it will be released with the final version of Architect, and the sister application Façade (spelled with ç = alt+c). It will be really nice

On another note, all my files will be here to download as well – which would give you a head start on making your own themes. All files (and there will be a lot of them), will be packaged according to the structure of Architect, for really ease of use. And they will all of course be in the lovely PSD format

Oh, and I almost forgot, here’s a small update:

Hey people

I will be a bit offline over the next couple of weeks. I will be having a small vacation, but check back soon for some updates on the Mobile me theme and AirSpiration.