[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 :

pin

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 :

pin-map

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 – 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.

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 – 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.

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] Flat UI Design

Image Credit

flat-ui

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 😛