I think it was all the intricate detail and photorealistic shadows and highlights that got me interested in the first place! Now, I try and strike a nice blend between the old, super realistic skeuomorphic icons, and a more refined, stripped-back icon that works better in context. I began icon design right around the peak of brushed metal, wood grain, astroturf, and leather interfaces and I’ve always found skeuomorphic design to be a fun challenge. Recreating an icon from scratch forces you to really study the details and understand what specifically makes it work what makes it great. I’m a big fan of learning and practicing through reproducing existing icons that resonate with you. Eventually, you can use the details and techniques you discover through this practice in new ways and shape them into your own style. I’ve talked about this on Twitter before but it’s worth repeating: I’m a big fan of learning and practicing through reproducing existing icons that resonate with you. Can you give one piece of advice to designers struggling with creative icon design? When designing icons in Sketch, Gavin takes full advantage of the Layer list. I like to think that every detail in an icon creates a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts, which means creating a great icon comes from challenging yourself to really nail every little highlight, shadow, color choice, etc. Even after making tons of app icons, I still hit new challenges trying to execute the idea, especially when going for a more skeuomorphic, lifelike style. This is where I turn to 3D tools and Sketch to create the final piece. The technical rendering itself is the second phase. You can do a beautiful, detailed rendering of a poor idea for an icon and it likely just won’t be that great of an icon. This can be a challenge for a whole variety of reasons, but in some ways, it’s the most important part of designing an icon. The first phase in my process is a lot of sketching, ideating and researching to get a few good concepts for the composition of the icon. When I zoom out a bit from the details and look at the challenges of the whole process I generally see my work in two overlapping phases: There are many little creative challenges involved in icon design, which is why it can be so fun! Icons should be a recognizable symbol for your app, give a good first impression, scale well to different sizes, have good contrast ratios, and more - all unique challenges. What are the challenges involved with developing these icons? Indirectly, studying existing icons, recreating them, and working with 3D tools have fundamentally changed the way I think about the details in icon design when I do get into Sketch to start drawing the final version. I’d say the largest change in my approach and techniques came from learning the basics of 3D design.Įven though I still render most of my final icons in a vector format in Sketch, having a 3D reference for perspective and lighting has directly helped me compose icons. I’m always trying to make incremental improvements and learn something with each icon I make, which has resulted in a lot of tiny changes to my approach over time. How has your approach to icon design changed over time? I’m currently working as a product designer at GitHub on mobile apps and still love making app icons all these years later!Īs a personal project, Gavin redesigned the Things icon for macOS. And after graduating from college, where I focused on Human Computer Interaction, I began working as a product designer and making icons for fun as well as for freelance projects. I very quickly became obsessed with figuring out this world of Photoshop and vector graphics and trying to make my own app icons.įrom there, my interest in product and icon design turned into a passion. I had this moment where it clicked that the icons I was looking at on my Mac were hand-drawn by designers. I remember first becoming interested in design through app icon design when I stumbled upon MacThemes back in high school. I’m a product and icon designer currently living in San Diego, California. You’re about to get a close look at Gavin’s approach to icon design, his love for skeuomorphism, and his creative tips for others in the field. We knew we had to reach out for a conversation. When we saw Gavin Nelson’s skeuomorphic mobile icon designs on Twitter, we loved how realistic the stitched-leather effect looked.
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