The Icon – it is a small element, yet it is the first thing that users see when meeting an application – and a first impression can last for a long time. So, it is very important for a product to have an attractive, clear and explanative icon. But how to reach that? I would […]

Icon design is my day-to-day business, ranging from universally applicable Home icons to very special icons for the wiring of electric relays in substations. Recently I learned that interpreters also use symbols to be able to “sketch” the meaning of spoken words quickly and recall them later. I used this occasion to take a step […]

After the introduction of Microsoft’s new approach to user interface design with its current mobile device Windows Phone and upcoming operating system Windows 8, user interface designers and clients alongside them are beginning to “think Metro style”. Based on Swiss Graphic Design principles (established in the 1950’s) and focusing on clean typography, not only interaction, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]