Design for life

I understand a brand needs to be nice and ours certainly is. Emoticons, however, need to convey… well… emotion. So I have the pleasure of being allowed to make a completely pissed-off version of the frog mascot of SAPO.

Really, it’s criminal how much fun I have sometimes.

As I continue to explore higher detailed icons, I’ve been having some fun redoing old emoticons. These are the representatives of the three main Portuguese football clubs: S.L. Benfica, Sporting C.P. and F.C. Porto. They are essentially the same frog, wearing the club colors in the shape of a scarf.

As with the Batman emoticon, I started out with a FreeHand drawing, imported into Photoshop as a smart object. Not much of the original vectorial is left as I redraw everything in Photoshop.

I believe in the flexibility of vectorial drawings, however, FreeHand is rather limited in what comes to gradients and so I’ve been exploring my options in Photoshop.

I know Illustrator is vastly better at gradients, with its mesh gradient tool. Sadly, my company has not bought me CS3 yet. I use the word ‘yet’ with some hope, you will notice.

Design for life has been upgraded to WordPress 2.3 “Dexter”. WP finally has a tag system!

Exploring resolution independence in Mac OS Leopard applied to emoticons. Here is the bat… frog!

Cower in a corner! Basic shape drawn using FreeHand and imported into Photoshop as a smart object for some hardcore tweaking.

This is when my job is really fun:

Photo camera, based on an old Pentax SP1000 my father had (and I’m now keeper of…). Freehand base drawing and Photoshop fiddling.

I have making icons for Windows, it’s always awkward and full of restrictions, but that being said, I just found a freeware application that creates Windows icons (including Vista icons), and is very nice to use.

It’s called IcoFX. I used to use Microangelo and, honestly, I find IcoFX easier to use and more powerful as it does a superb job of creating 16 color icons from 24-bit originals.

In Microangelo I always spent a bit dabbing around the 16 color versions to make them slightly more readable, but in IcoFX I hardly had to touch anything up.

Well worth a try, if you have to make an icon for Windows.