[Design] Weekly Challenge – Pin Icon

Yeah, it’s weekly challenge day again ! Today I want to design something looks simple but with some details inside. Again, after searching for a while in Dribbble, I pick two designs out of them and they are all about icons !

Icons
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Location icon
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Yes, they all look simple but there are really some details inside. For the first design, it uses shadow to make the image jump out with a little bit 3D effect. While for the second one, you can notice the designer only use few colors, bold lines to make it flat and clean. So here comes my brainstorming time, is it possible to make a pin icon like the second design and also it still has shadow inside to make it not so boring ?

Instead of starting to open my illustrator at once, there is also another idea hitting my mind. I want to make the pin icon different from the others with some personal ideas. After seeing so many pin icons from Google, I noticed that they all miss an important concept – What happened in the pinned place at that time ? Is it possible to provide information about Geo location and some random screenshots at that place ? If yes, for users, this may be more friendly to use when navigating the online map.

So here comes my design :

Yes, it is a pin icon but with some functionalities I want – a placeholder for images (with 15% opacity), shadows to make it 3D, and itself – a pin which makes you pin the place you want on the map. And I also make image about the real use case for this pin :

It may look not so clear, so you have to click on the image to check the real size (still compressed, but bigger).

Some Thoughts

From this challenge, I learned some skills about how to put shadow on images and how to make an image mask to showcase part of content you really want. And also, it is important for designers to think more about the real use case of what they designed before turning on illustrator. In this way, you won’t live in your own ivory tower.

That’s it, hope you guys like it and I would keep practicing on the way to design. Can’t wait to accept coming challenge next week, cheeeeers ! 😛

[Design] Weekly Challenge – Fire and some sketches

Another special day for weekly challenge ! After continuously practicing on drawing and illustrating these few days, I think I am addicted to these stuffs ! I still remember the time when I was still a sophomore student in the university, I was planing to take double majors on Computer Science and Industrial Design. Haha, but I didn’t take action in the end and still stayed on the CS fields.

After so much passing times, I am curious about the reason why I had such a plan in my mind then. Does it mean I love design ? Not sure, but it may take time to verify hmmmmm

Whatever ! Here comes today’s design challenge, this time I got a plan in my mind that I want to practice sketching and icon-designing, so after scanning dribbble, I found a simple logo here :

Branding | Exploration “Heated Speech”
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This time, instead of jumping into illustrator directly, I planed to do a rough sketch on my sketchbook first. (Yes, I bought it few months ago but I didn’t use it to sketch anything haha) This is what I got finally :

Yes, it’s fire with some sharp curves and that’s it ! So after doing this prototyping, I used illustrator to make a real one based on it !

In this logo, I spent so much time on drawing baselines on intersections of curves to make sure I can make the original sketch to real. In addition to this, in order to make it look really real, I realized the color is god damn important. So, I also spent more than half an hour on picking colors for the logo and took other’s works on the internet for references.

From my side, this part may be the most difficult part when designing this logo. I am not good with color so I had no any idea about what color to use ! (You would definitely agree with me when you see my wearings -_-) But as a programmer, we all have to solve problems on our daily jobs, so I decided to use some default linear colors and add some additional colors. Although I still don’t know how to choose, this is a good start for me, isn’t it !? haha

I think that’s all for today’s challenge ! Here comes some random sketches by following some online tutorial on how to draw objects. Hope you guys like it and any feedback and suggestions would be appreciated ! Stay tuned with my next work 🙂

Random Sketches

Wizard

My iPhone 4s

[Design] Weekly Challenge – Flame Flag

Yeah, today is weekend ! It means I can put more time and efforts on stuffs I like. After coming back from the swimming pool, it’s kinda a good time to practice designing something. After doing a quick grep form dribbble, I noticed two interesting works :

Fire
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Fort York
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The first work is a fire composed with word fire while the second one is waving flag. These two works like may not be so related at the first glimpse, but I think that would be interesting to combine both of them into one specific work. Based on this concept, I made another design called Flame Flag.

In this work, I learn how to use ruler to measure the length and degree of specific line, get more familiar with some hotkeys and do a sketch before drawing on Illustator. Although the image looks simple and without too much details, I still spend more than 2 hours on making some baselines, measuring details and some other stuffs.

I think I can finally understand a little bit of designer’s lives. The devil is definitely in the details. That’s it and hope you guys like this ! Any feedback or responses is appreciated 🙂

[Design] Weekly Challenge – Smile Clock

Gettin’ Handsy

When taking a peek at this work, there is a clock image hitting my mind at the same time. But instead of making a boring clock, I want to put more personal thoughts on my work, in this way, I decided to make the clock a little bit different from the normal ones and look like it is smiling.

Now’s that’s it, the Smile Clock. 🙂

[Design] Weekly Challenge – Angel Star

A Star + Wings
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When browsing some latest works in Dribbble, I accidentally notice this work made by Dizzyline. For me this design is simple, clean and also has some details behind it (Like shadow). As a illustrator newbie, I think this one may be a nice first start for me to practice my skills.

So, I made another logo called Angel Star.

Based on the original logo, I noticed there are shadows in it to make the wing a little bit more 3-dimensional. Except that, I learned how to make paths join together with [Cmd+J] and how to mirror stuffs. For a new hand, this is kind a good start and the result looks acceptable for me.

Can’t wait to pick up my pen with next challenge 😛

[Design] Today’s pick – Organic Cosmetics

This is kinda a newbie-friendly behind the scene to make me understand how do these designers design the logo.

Organic Cosmetics
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[Design] Flat UI Design

Image Credit

Flat User Interface Design is a minimalist aesthetic principle or design language currently used in various graphical user interfaces.

From wiki

Just realized that I have to spend some time on learning designs. As an engineer, this is kinda far away from my specialities but some knowledge about designs may help when discussing with UX / UI designers. No matter how, they are indeed interesting 😛