Photoshop iconbuilder
Recently someone took notice of some of the icons I'd used in he lab and commissioned me to make him a custom set based on the Marx Brothers, he being a big Marx brothers fan and all. I just try to make icons that scale reasonably well. I don't really worry about creating multiple versions of my icons for different icon sizes and views. Typically, here I just do a "QuickBuild" (which, unfortunately seems to be missing from later versions of IconBuilder). Finally I use IconFactory's IconBuilder 5.1 plug-in (no longer current) for Photoshop to export the image to the icon format. Then the image gets resized to 128x128 pixels.
Mainly, the blacks get washed out, so I have a Photoshop action that selects the black range and drops it down to zero. Typically, some color correction is required after the transfer. When I get a version I like I simply copy and place it into a 533x533 pixel Photoshop document. Basically all the drawing is done in Illustrator. My process is not very elegant, but I've used it for some time now and it works so I stick with it. The first one to emerge was a very flat, geometric style. I quickly outgrew the glossy, candy-coated style - especially once I realized that I sucked at, and didn't enjoy making them - and started developing my own. I labored on this thing for days, trying to get that shiny, translucent, jelly bean look so prevalent on the Mac. And since I dabble in icon creation, and have worked up quite a collection over the years, I've decided to post a little sampler, and talk about my process. Since this site is primarily about systems, it seemed appropriate to focus on an art form specifically related to the computer. I am, in addition to being a SysAdmin, a visual artist, after all. And while I've decided I'm way too lazy and busy at the moment to scan my doodles, I did feel TASB could use a splash of the creative. It was kind of magical, and I really liked that idea for a blog post. Khoi Vihn, the site's author, posted some absolutely lovely doodles he'd made, and I was instantly transported to my note-taking, doodle-drawing grad school days. Not long ago a fabulous post on doodling appeared at one of the blogs I frequent on a regular basis, Subtraction.