8/3/2023 0 Comments Flinto icon![]() ![]() Those are what I use to evaluate my ideas and sketches. I recently taught a class about Icon Design at CreativeLive, and outlined what I think are the most important design principles for icons. If you try to do both at the same time you will end up with nothing. Evaluation - while equally important - requires criticism, pragmatism, and the time to consider a long list of implications. The former requires imagination, curiosity, and withholding of judgement. I find it essential to separate the drawing & conceptual process from the evaluation process. The next stage is evaluation analyzing each concept based on how well it fits the goals, constraints, and context for this particular icon. While in this conceptual phase, I try to remind myself to put everything down on paper - even random ideas that seem unrelated. It begins with drawing every imaginable possibility for that icon - what the subject matter or metaphor will be and what variations they could take. No symbols that looked great at one size, or in a certain style, but couldn’t be adapted to others. Establishing consistency across all parts of Flinto’s interface meant that every icon had to be especially versatile. Some icons re-appear in multiple places, at multiple sizes, and in multiple styles. That is different from the appearance of sidebar icons, which is different from those you’d find in a dropdown menu. Even just for the icons! Toolbar icons have to be a certain size, and look a certain way. Surprisingly, I found that designing for a professional Mac app was one of the most complex contexts to work within. So that quickly became my main job! What is your strategy when designing elements like icons or menus inside of a bigger app?ĭesign is always driven by context. Nearly every part of the interface, from the Layers List, to the Toolbar, to the Transition Designer, to the Gestures dropdown was going to require its own set of icons. But because Flinto is a very specialized tool, the more we thought through each part of the user experience the more we realized that the app was going to require a ton of custom icons. ![]() I worked with Flinto in the months leading up to the release of Flinto for Mac, and contributed to various parts of the user interface and experience. How did you contribute to Flinto for Mac? Peter is a San Francisco based designer who created many of the UI elements in Flinto for Mac. We recently sat down with Peter Nowell to discuss what it took to create the meticulous icon system in Flinto for Mac. ![]()
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