Daily UI Design #5: App Icon

图片发自App

Today’s UI design theme is “app icon”. I decided to make an app icon for my "A Doooodle A Day".

I only designed app icons for fun a few times, so I'm far from expert on this topic. I browsed a few web pages that give tips for designing app icons, then decided to dive in.

A good app icon, I think, is very easy to recognize and recall. There should be something "special" added to it that makes you relate that icon image to the thing it represents, e.g. Snapshot's little ghost and Gmail's classic mail icon.

I started thinking about items related to "doodle", so that I can use them in the icon, like a pen, a pencil, a piece of paper, a sketchbook... I finally landed on the idea of a pencil and some scribbles it makes. My final idea was to display outlines for the items, on top of a coloring layer. Well, I was kind of confused about the layers at the end, and I was not able to adjust better colors out of it. Looks like it's time to study good color combinations.

图片发自App

Tool: I used Sketch and started with its app icon template (handy!), but later found it so inconvenient with vectors, since it doesn't handle many functions as well as Photoshop or Illustrator. I found myself while whining using it :(

图片发自App