Simple Web Icons Facts

February 27, 2011 Leave a comment

We can easily say that among the main features of minimalistic design are Simple web icons. Bear in mind that simple icons along with other design elements 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 multiple functions.

Simple web icons design consists of limited amount of color, reserved shades, clear elements, soft lighting. One of the best advantages of Simple icons is that they don’t distract website visitors from the main idea of your web site.

The following rules for simple icons design can be outlined:

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

How to build minimalistic design with simple web icons

Additionally to simple icons themselves light-weight background textures and patterns are important for the design and content perception. The eyes should focus on the web-site content or some main blocks but not on the background pattern or image itself. So the background should be of a light simple shade making it secondary compared with the foreground items like simple web icons.

Clear typography is an additional prominent feature of the lightweight and clear design. Choose simple icons names in accordance with their function and remember that such names ought to be precise, and meaningful. Also use understandable and enough large font for headings on simple web icons.

Also for developing a great clean simple icons design you can use enough white or empty space. Extra spaces keep elements more understandable. As a result it is more effortless to work with them. In case you use some extra space between simple web icons this don’t harm to the design of your site at all.

Speaking about the minimalistic trend in most cases it’s not totally minimal. In spite of its great amount of white space there are still some simple icons, light textures, neat styles and bold fonts. Minimal is just not exactly the same as simple. From the very begining minimal meant plain typographic not including images and styling. Nowadays there’s a great amount of various web sites over the Internet. That’s why modern design requires something more than black text on white background. Reducing design elements to the most essential items you can add more zest to your website layout with some uncommon coloring, catchy simple icons, half-transparent and lightweight textures and patterns.

Simple equals smart. While creating the modern web design you should keep in mind the eternal truth stating that genius is based on simplicity. Simple icons look fantastic and professional especially for a clean business style design.

Categories: Web Icons

Find Out All Benefits Of Using And Sources Of Getting Realistic Icons.

February 26, 2011 Leave a comment

Realistic icons are important elements of the modern pieces of software, applications and add-ons.

Sites are a special niche requiring special methods for representation as well as promotion. One of the most successful way is certainly including realistic icons into the web page design. Definitely icons will help users of your web site to get a quick initial impression of your web business and also products that you offer. The icons should be placed on website homepage to be noticeable at once.

Certainly if you would like have icons that fulfil all your requirements you have to hire the professional designer who can create some unique set of icons. But such custom orders of realistic icons are quite expensive and take significant period of time. After all the results of custom order are not clear. Even professional web site designers fall short of the mark called non-uniqueness. In order to save time and smoothen things down they take icons designed earlier and simply play with the colors and shades, use some other effects and sell realistic icons as unique items.

Finding authoritative icons resources it’s another way of getting wonderful web icons. You can easily find a great amount of various Realistic icons stocks and providers on the net. The great benefit of this kind of of getting web icons is that you see what you buy. The cost may be lower than in case with custom orders. Additionally you save your valuable time. So as far as you see now – stocks are much more preferable for finding properly designed and inexpensive realistic icons .

Tricks for utilizing realistic icons

Creating realistic icons you have to build the basic pictograms first. It should look vivid enough if being displayed at worse resolution, resized, discolored or blurred. The icon must be recognizable at first sight. You may make a test and see if it’s possible to discern the icon within just one second.

As soon as you find the formula of the basic silhouette and it is stable you may make realistic icons more eye-catching with a help of decorative elements. Icons shouldn’t be overloaded with the details and color tints. Icons should look well design and also reserved. You can also make the edges anti-aliased. The decoration should not detract from the icons essence and functions.

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

Realistic icons may be helpful in case you need to design the interface layout of the new software program or IT services. Designing high quality, eye-catching and good-looking realistic icons is not an easy task. Generally you should edit the high-resolution photos to get truly realistic images.

Categories: Web Icons

Simple Icons And Minimalistic Website Design

February 25, 2011 Leave a comment

Simple web icons are produced to unite minimalism and modern trend. Wonderful and light Simple icons are aimed to increase webpage user interaction.

Minimalistic web design – prevalent trend

Minimalistic design means simplicity and lightweight elements such as Simple icons. It eliminates complex wordings, figures, textures and patterns. Less even implies more in some areas and to some extent. Web site design is just that area.

Today minimalistic web page design is something unusual. High present day technologies often lead to the loss of simplicity. Blending minimalistic web page design with CSS3 and HTML5 is becoming more famous and makes you believe that combining simple elegance and usability is the formula for your web-site success. Web site which uses simple design often has off-color effects and also actively use CSS and Ajax.

Among essential features of the modern simple web page 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;
  • readable and clear typography;
Categories: Web Icons

Line Icons Handy Info

February 25, 2011 Leave a comment

Lines are more frequently used for outlining the contours of objects and emphasizing edges. Line icons can be the fantastic decoration of any website design, certainly if you have a talent to design them thoroughly.

Line icons – to be or not to be….

Let’s discover what line actually is. The shortest definition is the next: line is a form that contain both width and length but eliminating depth. The line is not only straight but more often curved. In spite of the being static shapes, Line icons can create an illusion of the dynamic objects. The mood depends on the lines direction. For example horizontal lines in Line icons bring the feeling of calmness, harmony and stability. Speaking about the vertical lines – they strive for the light movement. Energy and more powerful dynamic feeling pertain to the diagonal lines. If you wish to create refine and ultra-modern line icons designs you should use mix of straight lines and curves.

Emergence of line art.

Curve stitching is the first type of line art known to the artists. It was carried out with threads of different colors and needle. Originally the canvas was a cardboard. 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. Line art existed also like illustrations for print sources before the photography was created. At that time line art involved only black and white colors. A few shades of gray were also acceptable and imitated.Appealing to both technical and creative sides of human nature, line art includes geometry and art. Designing Line web icons may develop special imagination and creativity as well as calculation skills.Line art has an ability to be printed to the halftone pic without extra conversion. Thus it is different from photography or multi-color painting. This kind of art is named line drawing and line copy as well.

Categories: Web Icons

Vintage Web Icons And Vintage Web Design

February 24, 2011 Leave a comment

Vintage icons is one of the most noticeable and easy-to-apply graphical elements you may use in your website to make it look archaic. With a help of vintage web icons it’s easy to create the vintage atmosphere at your 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 trend is all about the styles of the70s and 80s. Speaking about retro advertising art it appeared in 1950. Computer technologies enable to put a new face on this type of art using its characters in web design and printing. These faces outlined in the vintage web icons are more often retro cars, pin-up girls, soldiers and politicians of the former times.Most frequently used retro cars are Fiat 500, the 1970 Dodge Challenger, the 1969 Chevrolet Samara, the 1964 Ford Mustang etc. Vintage web icons may contain hints to retro cars concepts for attracting more attention to your web page layout. This is the fantastic idea for websites that have a deal with auto sales, transporting services, tour sites etc. A pin-up model is another popular character used in vintage icons design and other web site graphics styling. It usually depicts exaggerated, idealized images of how the really beautiful and attractive woman should look like. Pin-up images are great for vintage web icons or clip-art designed for the model agencies, websites regarding health and beauty areas.

Military and security guard web-sites may successfully 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. Apply your creativity and use them as you wish. This will help to make people surprise and thus memorize your internet site.

Vintage Icons Patterns

Vintage patterns recommended for usage in vintage icons design is the following:

  • 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.

Authentic fonts to be used for developing vintage icons titles, content headings and texts are 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. The goal is to create the warm and noble, antique feel with a help of Vintage icons and also images and styled blocks for the web page layout. Without any doubt your visitors will return to your internet site with a thankful smile again and again. They will feel comfortable and cozy at your website.

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

Categories: Web Icons

2d Web Icons And Models Material

February 24, 2011 Leave a comment

2D web icons are actually well known for their flexibility. This is achieved by the peculiarity of rendering them at different resolutions suitable for various output devices.

2D Icons may embody the following 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 such as rotation, scaling or angular position etc. Meshing basic models you will 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 really should maintain the definite hierarchy and order carefully. This makes modifying 2D icons and similar objects easier.

2.5D Icons

2Dicons are also well known as 2.5D models. This technology gives web site designers ability to work with any layer without the need of touching the others. This type of 2D object creation is preferred by the most of the prominent graphics editors.

2.5D is a synonym to pseudo 3D and is interpreted as “two-and-a-half-dimensional” graphics. Models which were built with a help of with 2.5D technology appear to be tridimensional but in fact they are not. The featured projection depicts both front and side views.

This technology used for designing 2D icons is frequently attained by the special lighting effect. 3D illusion is reached as a result of virtual source of light to the left or to the right side and above the users monitor.

Categories: Web Icons

Realistic Icons

February 22, 2011 Leave a comment

Realism traces back to the 1850s when this movement spread in French art. Over the 100’s of years it came through all kinds of art and design. Realism in webpage design is effectively represented by Realistic web icons.

Brief discourse on history of realistic icons.

Categories: Web Icons

Line Web Icons Development – Various Techniques

February 22, 2011 Leave a comment

The objects with the outlined contours is the one other kind of Line web icons. They’re called contour drawings. There’re items without some strict outlines that are rather some hint than actual contour of line icons. They’re called gesture drawings. Such drawings are being widely used by skilled artists who are able to repeat the outlines of the object right after seeing it. It is not a complete piece of art but rather a sketch which requires 20-30 seconds to be drawn.

One more technique is adding some halftones and shades to the object with the help of short lines and crosshatching. Their frequency and pencil pressure can be different. This variety creates more three-dimensional look to the object. This particular trick is widely used in web design as well. So this method is extremely helping in designing of impressive Line icons, logos and buttons.The lines with the dots not combining the singular elements are classified as open lines. It may look really striking when being applied to line icons design. The lines can be gesture-like, parallel, contour etc. as well. Contour drawing includes superb simplicity and refinement of line design. You may be wonder what’s bezier curves in computer graphics? It’s such kind of the curves that are important for creating complex line shapes. These curves are real helpers in creation of the vector shapes such as line icons, unusual buttons etc. Nowadays computer technologies reached such a level when it becomes possible to reproduce exactly the same designs or just build new shapes that based on some older ones. The great thing – it can be done without extra efforts and time. Another advantage is that it’s easy to return to the previous adjustments with a help of the history panel. So you do not have to design Line web icons from scratch after you’ve made some errors.

Categories: Web Icons

Vintage Icons Design And Style

February 21, 2011 Leave a comment

Retro takes over the present day internet site design industry. Vintage icons representing the old-time styling are the message of classic beauty and noble taste, Vintage design trend arouses gentle feeling in the visitors hearts.Present day web site style receives some vintage twist. Retro and Vintage are the most famous and widely used trends in the modern digital art. Vintage web icons, textures, patterns and clip-art are so enchanting and mysterious. They make you dive into the atmosphere of the old happy times, when everything appeared to be so simple, innocent and noble. People think the good times are over associating them with their period of childhood or sweet youth. Hence vintage style revives for this reason psychological peculiarity of the human nature.

Retro style and the modern day internet site design industry

Speaking about retro in simple terms we should outline an aged or culturally outdated trend that has become some conscious norm in the modern art. Having emerged in the post-modern art, it penetrates into the contemporary webpage design in the form of vintage icons, old-styled backgrounds, aged photography etc. It is obvious it gives some zest to the feel and look of the ordinary websites.

The new retro style quite often incorporates the Web 2.0 look with a vintage twist. It needs to mix the modern clean blocks and the outdated ones. Also there’s a necessity to mix aged design elements like Vintage icons, styles and color palettes.

Categories: Web Icons

Two-Dimensional Graphics – 2d Icons Rule

February 20, 2011 Leave a comment

2D icons is a wide spread trend in the web design of nowadays. These two-dimensional icons are well known for their flexibility and comparative simplicity. 2.5D Icons is the type of 2D Icons that is closer to pseudo 3D representation.Such models show both front and side views.

Being originally based on vector graphics devices 2D computer graphics traces back to the 50s. 2D icons are among the most essential two-dimensional digital design items.

Today I want to find out what in fact 2D is.Generally it is being associated with computer graphics and determined as the two-dimensional way of digital images generation. Two-dimensional models are mainly 2D geometric ones, digital images and texts. The term 2D comprises not only the models themselves but the techniques and tricks specific to them at the same time.

2D icons and objects are independent objects with their own semantic value. 2D graphics can help you to get much more direct control of the image than 3D technology. This one of the reasons why they’re so preferred in the world of modern webpage design.

Categories: Web Icons