I continue to be surprised when I look at screenshots of the Windows 7 taskbar. In addition to detailing iPhone icon creation, the second part will also cover basic Mac icon design.

Created using free software as non-professional artists don't always have access to Photoshop.

Rounded corners and gloss are applied to a separate clone of the base artwork so the submission to Apple can be non-prerendered if you choose.

Entirely vector artwork, so it will scale from 57x57 pixels up to 512x512 pixels as required for App Store submissions.

This alternative approach has the following advantages: I wanted to show an alternative approach to the one suggested in that article.

This post is partly a response to Elite By Design's 'Design The iTunes Icon For The iPhone And iPod Touch' which produced an iTunes-style icon at 125x125 pixels in Photoshop. The goal of this series is to show non-graphics professionals how to create graphics of an acceptable level for their applications that follow the established visual trends for iPhone and Mac apps. While larger development teams have dedicated graphic artists to create icons and other artwork assets, the reality is that on smaller teams or on solo projects, a programmer may need to create icons themselves. It may seem strange to be covering icon creation in a Cocoa programming blog but the icon is an important part of an application and Cocoa is primarily an application programming environment.

The remaining four will be covered in the second part. Only the first icon will be created in this part. This series will cover the creation of the following different icons: In this first part, I'll talk about the common styles and traits of icons on the Mac and iPhone and give a step-by-step guide to creating the first iPhone icon in Inkscape. In this two part series, I'll give a beginner's guide to creating iPhone and Mac application icons using Inkscape - a free, vector illustration program.

Inkscape swatches empty