Revised Icon: Good Practice

Step 1

Add a grid and margins to your photoshop file. It is a 400 x 400 px template. The grid is 16 px squares. Add padding of 2 squares to all edges. This is the breathing room. No icon material should be placed in this. Add and inner +2 squares from that padding guide edge. This is room to go out of bounds for your icon design if necessary. The main space to work is the center of this board.

Step 2

Place the basic shapes for your icon that will inform the form and keep scale consistent. I made mine blue with 40% opacity to see how they layer and overlap. Make sure shapes snap to the grid squares.

 

Step 3

Start drawing your outline for your icon in another layer over the shapes you laid out. The line is black with a thickness of 4 px. Try to make all angles at 45 degrees. This is to keep the pixel edge consistence. Mine had a more titled perspective so the angle is not 45 degrees. If you need to step away from that go down in halves such as 22.5, 11.25, or in multiples of 15.

 

Step 4

Duplicate your outline folder in photoshop and merge and rasterize the shapes of your icon. Mine was merged in two shapes: top of the hat and the bottom. Then use the paint bucket tool to fill in your shapes.

 

Step 5

Now add 4 x 4 px circles to the corners of your icon to them a consistent rounded edge. I ended up adding one to the inner corner of the tassel as well.

 

Step 6

Preview your image without the grid and guides and see what adjustments need to be made. Redo the process to fix mistakes. For mine, I had the re-angle the lines at the top of the bottom cap so the spacing was even of 2 squared from the bottom edge of the top hat. Then adding a 4 x 4 px circle to inner corners as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PRLGBTQ Logo

I started working on the Puerto Rico LGBTQ Logo Design. The logo will be presented on PRLGBTQ website as well as their Twitter profile picture. Here’s my initial hand sketches.

For now, I don’t know yet whether the client wants the logo with the text or not, so my sketches presented both versions. I’m waiting to hear back from the client on this!

And here are my first two attempts.

I like the first version better because I think it has more of a ‘movement’ and isn’t as stiff as the second one, but I thought it was worth playing with the brush strokes on the second one anyway! For some ‘technical’ details, I was using Illustrator for creating the logo skeleton (also my first time actually understanding how the pen tool works!), and then I transferred the Ai file into Ps for some manipulations (added textures, brush strokes, etc.)

I’m super excited for this project, because I haven’t gotten to work on some graphics for a while now!

LACS Career Guides

It’s been awhile since I updated my blog, so I’ll try to summarize what I’ve been working on for the past month. The #1 project has been updating some of the pages on the Liberal Arts Career Services (LACS) site by converting some of the plain text into graphics.

I’ve been leading the project to create infographics for at least 12 of the LACS career guides, which are aimed at humanities grad students preparing for a career outside of school. I’ve been working with the client, Amy Vidor, to come up with a consistent style for all the infographics. We needed it to be monochromatic, and Suloni suggested rounding the corners on each of the blocks. I took the blue from the official UT color palette and reduced it to 40% and 15% opacity to get the lighter shades. This is what we settled on:

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All of the subsequent infographics will have the same general layout (i.e., a section for background, pathways, and desired skills/experience). The only parts that need to be changed out will be the text and icons, which need to be original. From the advocacy infographic, I created a template for all the LACS infographics that includes the color palette, specs (padding, font size, etc.), and other useful information.

Here’s where the template’s located, and here’s what it looks like:

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Several STAs have already starting working on more infographics, and I’ve been trying to give feedback on their progress. We have a lot of original icons to make, so to make the process easier I made a spreadsheet to track all the icons that need to be made. This will hopefully keep us from making duplicate icons and make it easier to see which icons are being reused:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rn05Y2paiIqVuF2tCvWbTOAiV9DEyUMy8ZSkHVmRgY8/edit#gid=0

 

 

Project: LACS Infographic

Client /Prof: Amy Vidor

Completion status: Started March 28, 2020

Staff guidance: Valerie Tran & Suloni Roberston

STA team members: Abriella Corker, Bridger Kessler, Maddy Kaniewski, Sheryl Long, and Thuy Hai Nguyen

Description/plans: Create icons and layouts for information on the Career Services page.

To be completed: Feb 25, 2020