Finger Tied Icon Design
September 25th, 2012
I spent much of last week working on the design for the Finger Tied icon. The icon is the first thing potential players see in the App Store, so it needs to grab their attention. It’s worth spending the time to make sure your icon looks good. I’m very pleased with how the final design turned out.
During the process, I had tweeted about how many revisions I had gone through and mused that maybe I’d post the progression when I was finished. A few people wrote back saying they’d like to see that, so this morning I put together a compilation of all the intermediate designs I could find.
So, for those who are curious about how I ended up with this final icon:
Here’s how I got there:
Finger Tied icon design. Top left was the first design, bottom right is the final design.
Owen
Hi Owen,
Thanks for sharing the evolution here, but I’d be interesting in learning why you made certain decisions along the path. Why did you abandon the white border? What’s really the difference between the last 5 icons? Personally I find icons a little difficult at times, so I’m intrigued with the thought process.
Looking good and thanks!
Hi Bill,
Glad you found in interesting. To your questions:
1) Abandoning the white border. This was done for several reasons, but the main two were: a) with a white border, the icon got lost when viewed in iTunes, as the white border tended to blend too much with the surrounding background in iTunes b) I wanted the colour to be more prominent so that the icon popped more.
2) The last 5 icons. By this point I knew this was the final design, so those last five icons are all very subtle differences. The changes are hard to see in the small sizes, but are more noticeable in the 1kx1k (or 512×512) version. But if you look closely, you’ll see subtle changes in the shapes/sizes of the shadows on the finger, slight changes to the colouring of the wrinkle lines in the finger, very slight changes to the darkness of the shadows, and very very slight changes to the gradient of the burst of light behind the finger. All very subtle changes, but that make a difference to the way the icon looks.
I hope that was more informative.
Owen