Work Notes: Icons for iPhone apps

Your basic iPhone apps only need two icon sizes, a nice change from all the handsets around.

For our uses I’ve found it’s best to do the 512 icon first, while constantly keeping a small, roughly 57 sized zoomed version of the same document on the side to see that there’s enough interesting stuff happening on the small version. I tend to do my 512:s in 1024 for extra crispness.

(A fictional example image)

After the 512 is done, I (selectively) flatten & downscale it to 57 (with bicubic sharper), and add a layer where I try to return some small scale detail with the pen tool and eyedropper, not making a pixel art version of it but rather adding some sharpness and clarity to the edges.

I’m not a fan of ze Apple Glare unless the icon is a clean high-contrast vector illustration. So I’ve got a group in which the whole image goes, with a rounded vector clipping mask to retain the correct icon edges, and a couple of light layers that i blend on top of the image to add a nice highlight while retaining more shadows in the upper parts of the image.

(A fictional iPhone application icon)

Something like that. Zen Bound 2, not the iPhone one but the other one, is now in the late phases of testing and playing everything. Meaning it’s pretty close to ready, Apple and the gods of shiny unknown future tech willing. Soon, very soon, it’s time to rest.

In Turkey. Where the wild tourists are.