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WIP: Royalty ExpandedNovember 26 2008

I havn’t been posting a lot lately, but I am still here. There is a lot to do - so I havn’t had that much time for icons. But here’s a small wip I am working on. I often use Jonas Rask’ iconset Danish royalty free icons are great, but often I need a few extras on web projects. So I decided to make a few myself.

This is still big-time work in progress, but I hope for an release at some point

Wallpaper: A greener AppleOctober 16 2008

Basically just an afterthought on the recent mac event.

Case: BylineOctober 14 2008

Update:

Tuaw made a small review of the new version of Byline, and it looks like they liked the new icons. The appleblog also made a really positive review.

I have been working on a few icons and illustrations for an iPhone application called Byline, made by Phantom Fish. Byline is a Google RSS reader, for your iPhone or iPod touch. Byline also has some nice offline reading abilities, check it out, you can find it here in the iTunes Store.

As usual the collaboration went very good, and we exchanged some ideas before starting the project.

Four interface icons were created, as well as a wooden backdrop:

New item

Wallpaper: Aqua AppleOctober 9 2008

Hello everyone

Long time no post, but I am still here, checking up on the blog every day. I have a lot of work at the moment, both freelance and at e-mergency. I have a small treat for the bunch of you in a couple of days, where I can show you a small case I worked on a while ago. So remember to check the blog in a week or so

If you by any chance are a multimedia genius who know a lot about php, and you got the social skills to match - please feel free to contact e-mergency, as we are hiring :) 

I made this little gem for all of you out there, who are so kind and keep visiting my tiny blog. Just a small piece, water and apples

Hope you like it, and remember to leave a comment.

PSD: Making it scaleAugust 28 2008

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 512×512px becomes, 1px in 32×32px 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