New Territory?

While I was sat at work on my lunch break today, I was thinking about my creative side and how I could bring myself back into the software and processes that I love. I got to thinking about the people and friends who have inspired me over the years, which along the lines led me to think about Sebastiaan de With.

Sebastiaan has been a good friend for a long time and been a huge inspiration for me in the past, so I highly recommend you to view his work. So I got to thinking about his current work with OSX and Application Iconography and how a lot of challenging work must go into creating his icons, which show what an application is about and does while maintaining a visual interest.

This of course excited me to an extent, I’ve never actually sat down and properly designed an eye pleasing Icon. In fact I always had difficulties in the past with Iconography and was too pre-occupied with creating “pretty” prints and personal work.

From that first moment of excitement I realised that it was time to try and bring something to a community that needed less pretty images, more usability, while keeping a great visual impact. Something that everyone could view and critique yet actually get some use out of.

So this was the beginning of what could be my first and last venture into different design territory.

Then came the no brainer choice of what application I wanted to design for. Since I absolutely despise the plain and boring Adobe CS3 identity set (I hate those coloured boxes that are sat in my dock right now!), I chose those as my target.

After getting back home from work, some three hours later, I still had the thoughts running through my head. I sat down with a pen and a sketchpad and drew out my initial idea’s for Photoshop (image below).

I’ve decided to document these sketch book pages here in hopes of gaining some criticism. This is also a means of keeping a visual and written diary for me to refer to as I progress. Of course these are just initial idea’s and the final design of the Icon may deviate from these some where along the lines. And I will probably not post the sketch of the final design once I have it and ready to release the actual icon, but that could still be some time from now.

Either way, this is the start of my new jump into an unknown, new territory: