There are a lot of free icon libraries out there, however, only few of them focus mainly on medical icons and we wanted this gap to be closed: we introduce Centigrade’s stock icon library MedicalSeries, containing 60 icons that you can download free of charge.

Red is not always red, green is not always green. For quite a large amount of people it is not easy to distinguish between red and green hues. About 6% of all males have the same difficulties to tell orange from olive-green as unaffected people have to distinguish between burgundy and ruby-red – oftentimes, it is impossible. This most common kind of color vision deficiency is called Deuteranomaly, also known as “green weakness”. The following article will deal with the question of how this wide-spread impairment impacts the production process of high quality icons.

The previous part of this series outlined why it is not possible to just create one single vector-based instance of an icon to scale it to any desired size. This part raises the question, on the one hand, what tool support would need to exist in the future in order to serve an icon designer’s everyday work adequately and, on the other hand, what tool support already exists to make his life at least a bit easier in the present times.

The previous part explained why both a pure pixel-based or pure vector-based approach to icon design implies drawbacks. As Centigrade provides professional icon design services, we continuously investigate how to make our icon design process more efficient and overcome technical shortcomings.

In the previous part I gave a quick introduction to resolution independence. This part explains what technical limitations exist that complicate the job of creating high quality resolution independent icons.

About two years ago there have been some lively discussions on resolution independent user interfaces in the context of icon design. An interesting start page for past discussions is Sven Porst’s blog article. At that time, resolution-independent UI-related products such as Mac OS X Leopard, Windows Vista or Silverlight were either yet to come or have been used solely by a small bunch of insiders. Now, almost two years later, these are established brands – reason enough to shed some light on this topic again and to see if something has changed during this time, and if so what.