Sunday, February 27, 2011

Tips To Create Line Web Icons

Usually Line web icons are the objects with the outlined contours. Such design elements are known as contour drawings. There are items without some strict outlines which can be rather some hint than actual contour of line icons. They're referred to as gesture drawings. Such drawings are being widely used by skilled designers who can repeat the outlines of the object right after seeing it. It's not a complete piece of art but rather a sketch which usually requires 20-30 seconds to be drawn.

One more technique is adding some halftones and shades to the object. It's possible with the help of short lines and crosshatching. Dont afraid to vary their frequency and pencil pressure. And this variety creates more three-dimensional look to the object. This trick is widely used in web design as well. So this technique is really helping in creation of wonderful Line web icons, logos and buttons.The lines with the dots not combining the singular elements are known as open lines. It may look really striking when being applied to line icons design. The lines can be also parallel, gesture-like, contour etc. Contour drawing consists of great simplicity and refinement of line design. You may be want to know what is bezier curves in computer graphics? It's such type of the curves that are essential for creating complex line shapes. These curves are useful small features important for developing the vector shapes like line icons, unusual buttons etc.Computer technologies make it possible to reproduce the same designs or build new shapes based on some older ones without extra efforts and time. Another benefit is that it is simple to return to the previous adjustments with a help of the history panel. As a result there's no need to create Line icons from scratch in case you have made some mistakes.

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Vintage Web Icons Vital Information

In case your want your internet site looks archaic - use Vintage web icons. They are one of the most noticeable and easy-to-apply graphical elements. With a help of vintage web icons you can certainly create the vintage atmosphere at your web-site. Also use vintage typography, less-saturated colors and retro textures. Antique air is going to charm and brings unconscious smiles to the faces of your website visitors.

Retro came from the70s and 80s. Retro advertising art from the 1950s is bold and eye-catching. Presently with a help of computer technologies you are able to put a new face on this type of art and easily use its characters in web site design and printing. Often such faces in the vintage web icons are retro cars, pin-up girls, soldiers and politicians of the former times as well.Most frequently used retro cars are Fiat 500, the 1970 Dodge Challenger, the 1969 Chevrolet Samara, the 1964 Ford Mustang etc. Vintage icons may contain hints to retro cars concepts for attracting more interest to your website layout. They are perfect for the websites concerning auto sales, transporting services, tour sites etc.A pin-up model is another popular character used in vintage icons design and other website graphics styling. It often depicts exaggerated, idealized images of how the really beautiful and sexy woman should look like. If you are an owner of the web page regarding health and beauty areas or the model agencies - keep in mind that you can use pin-up images that are great for vintage web icon.

Military and security guard websites may effectively use soldiers and officers with an outdated appearance to win the site visitors favour and trust.

Usage of specific characters is not limited to the above-mentioned ones. You may apply creativity and use them unconventionally. Thus you will surprise your visitors. As far as you know it is a good way to turn your potentional customers minds to your website.

Vintage Icons Patterns and Typography

Recommended Vintage patterns in vintage icons design:

  • patterns containing vintage papers;
  • with vintage frames;
  • with outmoded florals;
  • paper and bagging, gold-cloth as the texture fabric;
  • wooden or bronze textures for vintage icons.

For creating vintage icons titles, content headings and texts you can use such authentic fonts as Matchbook, Bazar Medium, Embossed, Hill House,-Fontleroy Brown, Fusty Saddle, Just Old Fashion, Goudy Bookletter 1911, Rocket Script, Parisian, Star Avenue etc. You are absolutely free to find and purchase the fonts to match your design on the net.

If being relevant to the topic, general style and idea of your website vintage-inspired layout is supposed to look fashionable and appropriate, but no old-fashioned. If you create the cozy and noble, antique feel using Vintage icons, images and styled blocks for the webpage layout, your visitors will come to your site with a thankful smile over and over again. They will feel comfortable and cozy at your internet site.

But try to avoid stuffiness in your vintage design look. Do not forget that the main emphasis should be made on the goods, services or content material of your website not on the web design.

Simple Icons Important Characteristics

Simple web icons are among the principal features of minimalistic design. Additionally, simple icons as well as other elements of design should be used moderately. Reduce the amount of simple icons. Use them only where it is essential. Refrain the optional simple web icons. They may serve several functions.

Limited amount of color, reserved shades, clear elements, soft lighting are being used for simple web icons design. One of the best advantages of Simple icons is that they do not distract website visitors from the main idea of your website.

Rules for simple icons design:

  • minimal usage of duplication
  • less amount of graphical elements
  • maximum intuitive clarity
  • clear typography in simple web icons
  • less icons

Minimalistic design with simple web icons

Do not forget about lightweight background textures and patterns. They're also important for the design and content perception as well as simple icons. The background pattern or images should not catch all the attention of your visitors. The eyes should focus on the webpage content or some main blocks. Developing the background use a light simple shade. This makes it secondary compared with the foreground items like simple web icons.

Clear typography is an additional prominent feature of the lightweight and clear design. Simple icons names (if there are any) should be precise, meaningful and equivalent to their function. Headings placed on simple web icons should be of readable font and large enough for easy reading.

Also for building a great clean simple icons design you can use enough white or empty space. Extra spaces keep elements separate and thus much more readable and simpler to work with. In case you use some extra space between simple web icons this dont harm to the design of your site at all.

Generally the minimalistic trend isn't entirely minimal. In spite of its large amount of white space there are still some simple icons, light textures, neat styles and bold fonts. Don't forget that minimal is not exactly the same as simple. Initially minimal meant plain typographic excluding images and styling. Nowadays there is a great amount of various website pages over the Internet. That's why modern design demands something more than black text on white background. Reducing elements of design to the most essential items you can add much more zest to your web site layout with some uncommon coloring, catchy simple icons, half-transparent and lightweight textures and patterns.

Simple is often used as a synonym of smart. Simple icons look great and professional especially for a clean business style design.

Line Icons - The Beauty Of Web Design

We typically use lines for emphasizing edges as well as outlining the contours of objects. If located and developed reasonably, line icons can be the perfect decoration of any minimalistic or clear website design.

What are line icons?

Let's learn what line actually is. The shortest definition is the following: line is a form that contain both width and length but eliminating depth. The line is not only straight but more often curved. The lines can provide some appropriate mood or feeling of a movement. In spite of the being static shapes, Line icons can make an illusion of the dynamic objects. The mood depends on the lines direction. As an example horizontal lines in Line web icons bring the feeling of calmness, harmony and stability. Speaking about the vertical lines - they strive for the light movement. The diagonal lines reflect energy along with stronger dynamic feeling. If you wish to develop refine and ultra-modern line icons designs you should use combination of straight lines and curves.

Line art - Line Icons

Curve stitching is the first kind of line art known to the artists. It's carried out with threads of various colors as well as needle. The canvas was a cardboard first. This movement is also well-known as "String Art". Originally it was found out by Mary Boole as the accessory material for kids to help them study geometry of angles and spaces.Spirelli is a form of string art that's been usually applied to scrap-booking and making cards. Line art existed also in the form of illustrations for print sources before the photography was invented. At that time line art included only black and white colors. Some shades of gray were also acceptable and imitated.Appealing to both technical and creative sides of human nature, line art includes geometry and art. So if you desire to become a Line web icons designer remember that this process may develop imagination and creativity and also calculation skills.Line art differs from photography or multi-color painting by its ability to be printed to the halftone pic without extra conversion.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Simple Icons As Greatest Representative Of Minimalistic Webpage Design

Simple icons are created to unite minimalism along with modern trend. Excellent and light-weight Simple icons are aimed to improve web-site user interaction.

Minimalistic web page design

Lets find out what minimalistic website design indicates. Of course the first characteristics are simplicity and light-weight elements. Simple icons involve all of this. This type of icons doesnt have complex wordings, figures, textures and patterns. Sometimes less even implies more. It depends on areas and extent. Web page design is exactly such area.

Minimalistic design is quite an unexpected trend at present. So far as you know high present day technologies have one big drawback - frequently they resulted in the loss of simplicity. Nowadays the modern trend is to combine minimalistic web page design with CSS3 and HTML5. Web site with simple design often contain brave and off-color effects and actively use CSS and Ajax.

Among important features of the modern simple internet site design are the following:

  • grid based design;
  • simple icons;
  • light shading and reserved color transition;
  • light texture of patterns and backgrounds (often transparent like);
  • more empty or white space;
  • simple shapes and figures, clear lines;
  • less amount of various bright colors;
  • clear and readable typography;

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Realistic Icons Important Info.

Realistic icons are crucial elements of the present day website design. You can also meet them in softwares, applications and add-ons, etc.

Webpages are a special niche demanding special means of representation as well as promotion. One of these methods is including realistic icons into your web design. Undoubtedly icons will help users of your web site to get a quick initial impression of your internet business and also products that you offer. The icons should be placed on webpage homepage to be noticeable at once.

Surely if you wish to have icons that fulfil all your requirements you have to hire the professional designer who can make some unique set of icons. But such custom orders of realistic icons are very expensive and take significant period of time. The custom order result still remains indefinite Sometimes even professional web site designers produce not exactly that you want. In order to save time and smoothen things down they take icons created earlier and simply play with the colors and shades, use some other effects and sell realistic icons as exclusive items.

Finding authoritative icons resources it's another way of getting wonderful web icons. There are different Realistic web icons stocks and providers on the net. The great advantage of this method of getting web icons is that you see what you pay for. The price may be lower than in case with custom orders. Moreover you save your valuable time. So as far as you see now - stocks are much more preferable for finding well designed and low-cost realistic icons . All these advantages make icon stocks the great deal.

Some helpful suggestions for utilizing realistic icons

Creating realistic icons you need to build the basic pictograms first. It should look vivid enough if being displayed at worse resolution, resized, discolored or blurred. The person should be able to identify the icon meaning just by looking at its outlines for a short time period. You can conduct a test and see if it is possible to discern the icon within just one second.<\p>

The next thing is to make realistic icons more eye-catching with a help of decorative elements. Do not overload icons with the details and color tints. Icons should look well design and reserved. You can make the edges anti-aliased. So bear in mind the simple rule - the decoration shouldn't take away from the icons essence and functions.

The icons are often stored in vector format which makes it pretty simple to edit. It enables you to resize, rotate, adjust the edges and modify outlines. You can even change the color scheme and add more details etc. So you needn't be an experienced designer or an artist to use them.

Realistic web icons may be handy in case you need to design the interface layout of the new software or IT services. But remember if you'd like to generate top quality and eye-catching realistic icons you need to be patient because it is not easy. Truly realistic images may be produced only if you take and modify the high-resolution photos. So bear this in mind.

2d Icons And Models

2D icons and other objects are well known for their flexibility. This is achieved by the peculiarity of rendering them at various resolutions ideal for various output devices.

2D Icons items:

  • raster pictures (digital graphics);
  • styled text as a typeset for 2D Icons;
  • vector models (geometric graphics).

The above-mentioned items can be managed by 2D transformations for example rotation, scaling or angular position and so on. Meshing basic models you may get more complex ones.

Because of the layers technique 2D web icons can create the illusion of all 3D characteristics like shadow, reflection or highlighting. The layers should maintain the certain hierarchy and order carefully.

2.5D Icons vs 3D and 2D Icons

The layered 2Dicons also are generally known as 2.5D models. This technology enables web-designers to work with any layer without touching the others. The most of the prominent graphics editors prefer this kind of 2D object creation.

2.5D is a synonym to pseudo 3D. It means "two-and-a-half-dimensional" graphics. Models that were created with a help of with 2.5D technology appear to be tridimensional but in fact they aren't. The featured projection represents both front and side views.

This technology used for designing 2D web icons is frequently attained by the special lighting effect. 3D illusion is achieved due to the virtual light source to the left or to the right side and above the users monitor.