Designing iOS style App icons

Hi all,

I'm sure that this will be covered somewhere but I can't find it ....

Is there a tutorial for App Icons (eg for iOS)? I've found the excellent one for Gell Buttons:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm94Iy7mIyg

and this almost does what I'm after but not quite. Is there something more specific (including exporting to the right size etc)

Bob

Welcome to TalkGraphics

There are quite a few already designed buttons in the Designs Gallery that you can modify as you wish.

Here is a link to Apple's documentation for creating icons and images for iOS. It provides the pixel sizes for each device and what the operating system will automatically add to the icon/image. http://developer.apple.com/library/i...onsImages.html

If you include drop shadow, rounded corners, and shine effects to your icon/image it will be also added by iOS so the icons will not look the way you had hoped.

Really helpful to have the weblink, thank you. I didn't realise that iOS added the drop shadow and 'shine' ... humm helpful (or not)

Using the existing buttons sort of 'gets the job done' but I'd be keen to see a 'start to finish' walkthrough with best practice eg naming colours and using shades of that so that different colour sets could be easily created. Also - the best way to save (export) to the appropriate file formats etc.

I'd have thought that there would have been a LOT of chat here about this - it would seem (to me) that Xara would be the prefect tool for this. I'm very surprised that there isn't more on this .... but thanks for these tips

Bob

For IOS, design the buttons as plain, without rounded edges and no gel effect. IOS will by default add the shine and round the corners. There is no special skill required - just make them the correct size.

It is helpful for IOS to do the donkey work, because then we don't have a panel of icons that don't quite match in style. At least this way around the gel effect is uniform, as are the corners.

As has been said, you can do the gel effect if you wish to, but it's not a sensible thing to do in this context.