Friday, February 25, 2011

Simple Icons And Webpage Design

Simple web icons are created not to make the design exquisite but instead minimal and modern. Lightweight Simple web icons are meant to be built to improve web page user interaction.

Minimalistic internet site design

Let's discover what minimalistic internet site design indicates. Certainly the first characteristics are simplicity and light-weight elements. Simple icons contain all of this. It reduces complex wordings, figures, textures and patterns. Sometimes less even means more. It depends on areas and extent. Web design is exactly such area.

Minimalistic design is rather an unexpected trend nowadays. High present day technologies often lead to the loss of simplicity. Blending minimalistic web page design with CSS3 and HTML5 is becoming more well-liked and makes you believe that combining simple elegance and usability is the formula for your internet site success. Simple does not always mean primitive. Web site with simple design often contain brave and off-color effects and actively use CSS and Ajax.

Among significant features of the modern simple web 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;

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Realistic Icons Important Info.

Realistic web icons are important elements of the modern website design. Also you can meet them in softwares, applications and add-ons, etc.

Internet sites are a special niche requiring special methods for representation and promotion. Probably the most effective way is of course including realistic icons into the web site design. For sure icons will help users of your web site to get a quick initial impression of your internet business as well as products that you offer. The icons should be placed on web site homepage to be noticeable at once.

Certainly if you want to have icons that fulfil all your requirements you have to hire the professional designer who can make some unique set of icons. But take into account that such way of creating of realistic icons is very expensive and takes a great deal of time. After all the results of custom order are not clear. Even professional website designers fall short of the mark known as non-uniqueness. To save time and smoothen things down they take icons created earlier and simply play with the colors and shades, use some other effects and sell realistic icons as exclusive items. Though in fact they aren't.

Finding authoritative icons resources it's another way of getting nice web icons. There are various Realistic web icons stocks and providers on the internet. The great benefit of this method of getting web icons is that you see what you buy. The cost may be lower than in case with custom orders. In addition, you save much valuable time. Thus for finding nice and inexpensive realistic icons stocks are much more preferable. All these positive aspects make icon stocks the great deal.

Some helpful tips for utilizing realistic icons

If you make a decision to produce a realistic icon first of all you need to build the basic pictograms. It should look simple and motivated enough to create one icon significantly differ from another. It should look vivid enough if being displayed at worse resolution, resized, discolored or blurred. The person should be able to recognize the icon meaning just by looking at its outlines for a short time period. You can conduct a test and see if it's possible to discern the icon within less than a second.<\p>

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

The icons are often stored in vector format that 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. And do not be afraid - there's no need to have extra knowlages in web site design.

Realistic icons may be useful in case you need to design the interface layout of the new software or IT services. Bear in mind if you'd like to create good quality and eye-catching realistic icons you should be patient because it's not easy. Truly realistic images may be created only if you take and edit the high-resolution photos. So bear this in your mind.

All You Need To Know About Line Icons

We generally use lines for emphasizing edges as well as outlining the contours of objects. If placed and developed reasonably, line icons can be the ideal decoration of any minimalistic or clear web site design.

Line Icons - what do you know about them?

What's actually a line? The shortest definition is the following: line is a form that contain both width and length but eliminating depth. We are accustomed to the fact that the line is usually straight. Newertheless the line is 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. As an example horizontal lines in Line web icons bring the feeling of calmness, harmony and stability. Speaking about the vertical lines - they strive for the light movement. The diagonal lines reveal energy as well as stronger dynamic feeling. If you would like develop refine and ultra-modern line icons designs you should use combination of straight lines and curves.

Line art background

Curve stitching may be the first type of line art known to the artists. It was carried out with threads of various colours as well as needle. The canvas was a cardboard first. String Art is another name for this movement. Generally it was found out by Mary Boole as the accessory material for children to help them study geometry of angles and spaces. Line art lived also in the form of illustrations for print sources before the photography was created. At that time line art included only black and white colors. Some shades of gray were also acceptable and imitated.Appealing to both technical and creative sides of human nature, line art combines geometry and art. Designing Line icons may develop special imagination and creativity as well as calculation skills.Line art differs from photography or multi-color painting by its ability to be printed to the halftone picture without extra conversion.

Various Techniques For Line Web Icons Design

The objects with the outlined contours is the one other kind of Line web icons. Such design elements are called contour drawings. It's also possible to find another type of icons: the items are without some strict outlines. They're named gesture drawings. Experienced designers often use such type of drawings because they're able to repeat the outlines of the object just after seeing it. It's not a complete piece of art but rather a sketch which needs 20-30 seconds to be drawn.

One additional way is adding some halftones and shades to the object. It can be done 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. So this technique is definitely helping in creation of great Line icons, logos and buttons.The lines with the dots not combining the singular elements are known 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. The curves which are essential for creating complex line shapes are called Bezier curves in computer graphics. 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 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 go back to the previous adjustments with a help of the history panel. So you don't have to design Line icons from scratch after you've made some errors.

Get All Material About 2d Icons And Models

2D icons and other objects are well known for their flexibility. This versatility is reached by rendering them at various resolutions suitable for various output devices.

2D Icons 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 for example rotation, scaling or angular position and so on. Meshing simple models you may get more advanced ones.

As a result of layers technique 2D icons can create the illusion of all 3D characteristics such as shadow, reflection or highlighting. The layers really should maintain the definite hierarchy and order carefully. This makes editing 2D icons and related objects easier.

2.5D Icons versus 3D and 2D Icons

2Dicons also are known as 2.5D models. This technology enables site designers to work with any layer with no need of touching the others. The most of the prominent graphics editors prefer this kind of 2D object creation.

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

This technology used for designing 2D web icons is often achieved 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.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Vintage Icons Style Makes Online Site Visitors Smile

Retro gradually increases its right place in the present day web design field. Vintage icons representing the old-time styling are the message of classic beauty and noble taste, Vintage design trend evoke gentle feeling in the visitors hearts.Modern web site style receives some vintage twist. Retro and Vintage are the most famous and widespread trends in the contemporary digital art. Vintage icons, textures, patterns and clip-art are so marvelous and mysterious. They assist you to create the atmosphere of the old good times, with feelings of simplicity, innocence and nobility. People believe the good times are over associating them with their period of childhood or sweet youth. As a result psychological peculiarity of people vintage style is so well-liked.

Discover all about retro style

Speaking about retro in simple terms we should outline an aged or culturally outdated trend that has become some conscious norm in today's 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.

Typically the new retro style contains the Web 2.0 look with a vintage twist. It requires to mix the modern clean blocks and the outdated ones. Also there's a necessity to combine aged design elements like Vintage icons, styles and color palettes.

Simple Icons Characteristics

We can easily claim that among the most important features of minimalistic design are Simple web icons. Remember that simple icons as well as other design elements should be used moderately. Reduce the amount of simple icons. Use them only where it is absolutely necessary. Optional simple web icons are to be refrained from repetition or eluded.

Simple web icons design contains limited amount of color, reserved shades, clear elements, soft lighting. One of the greatest benefits of Simple web icons is that they do not 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 create minimalistic design with simple web icons

Don't forget about lightweight background textures and patterns. They're also important for the design and content perception as well as simple icons. The background pattern or images should not catch all the attention of your visitors. The eyes should focus on the website content or some main blocks. Developing the background use a light simple shade. This makes it secondary compared with the foreground items like simple web icons.

Clear typography is an additional prominent feature of the lightweight and clear design. Simple icons names (if there are any) should be precise, meaningful and equivalent to their function. Headings placed on simple web icons need to be of readable font and huge enough for easy reading.

Also for developing a great clean simple icons design you can use enough white or empty space. Extra spaces keep elements separate and for that reason much more readable and easier to work with. Even if you use some extra space between simple web icons this do not harm to the design of your site at all.

In general the minimalistic trend is not entirely minimal. Nevertheless the dominance of white space there are still some simple icons, light textures, neat styles and bold fonts. Minimal isn't exactly the same as simple. From the very begining minimal meant plain typographic excluding images and styling. But modern day design requires something more than black text on white background to make the website distinguish among thousands of other plain sites. Add more zest to your internet site layout with a help of some unusual coloring, catchy simple icons, half-transparent and lightweight textures and patterns. Also reduce design elements to the most essential items.

Simple is often used as a synonym of smart. Simple web icons look fantastic and professional especially for a clean business style design.