From hand drawing to vector image, anthronic icon finally finished.

For a long time, I always wanting to make my own icon for anthronic.com, several way already been tried before, but the result is never satisfying and I most likely always ended up copying and sometime modifying apple's iconic icons instead of my own. Last week I decided that if I want to create an icon I must go back to the most basic feel of icon making that I know best, drawing it by hand. From that point the rest is suprisingly kinda feel easier.

In this article, I will try to describe the process of my own icon -from hand drawing to vector image- to you all, keep reading after the break!

It start with hands and notebook baby!

Came from strong basic-hand-drawing art (I said strong, not good) and wandering around in vector world lately, I always find its awkward to make a conceptual design straight to digital canvas using a mouse. Of course all this time, I made logos and several other thing using pure computer, but for conceptual design, I much prefer using my hand.

And for me the most convenient place for all the drawing is of course my notebook, my good ol line grid that I used for almost everything

This is not moleskin notebook because this one cost 1/3 of moleskin price but with the same paper quality, and yeah I know my font drawing is kinda suck.

What you represent

The next thing I do is to gather all unique trait about anthronic.com that I can found out at that moment, some of them are; Design | outsider | ITB | tips and trick | life and so on

start sketching and stop talking

After I know what my concept is, I start making some sketch/drawing base on those traits.

Logical move. Always start drawing from letter A. A = anthronic = Anto.

Some other drawing that I made. I finally settled with iconic 3D callout sign that can represent most of anthronic unique traits.

Vectoring the sketch

After satisfied with the icon drawing concept, I move on to make the vector version of the same drawing using CorelDraw 13 as my tool of choice. Of course you can use other tool for icon vector creation, it just that I used CorelDraw all my life that I cannot used other vector application as fluently as CorelDraw

I'm going to used perspective feature of CorelDraw heavily for today icon, so the first thing to do is to make 2D version of the icons, view from top side for better 3D making

I used weld to have the desired curve shape.

Perspective feature was used for easier way, you can use the old way (using two fade point) to accomplished the same result.

For volume making, I used extrude tool for easier way.

After extruding, the shape start to make sense, and from there, it take only few step more and hours of fine tuning in every aspect to give a new icon a life.

Final Result

I'm not going to say that this is the best icon in the world, but being my first full blown 3D shape icon, I think I'm kinda nailed it nicely. Of course I still have much to learn about icon design, but I think this icon design is a fresh new idea for me and worth a more deep exploration.

Conclusion

So that's it folk, my step of creating icon, began with hand drawing and end in vector image. Hopefully you can grab some basic understanding of what I did, and see you in other tips and trick in anthronic.com