Hi, We are looking for someone to redesign our icons for our application. We provide a windows-based system to manage distribution centers and yard activities(receiving, shipping, shunting of trailers, guard shack, etc) Currently we have around 200 icons which have what we call a 'funky' style We want to move away from this style which we have had for many years now. I am looking for serious people who are willing to take on this challenge. Anyone interested? I can provide samples of our icons if required, but please post YOUR samples also. Also include your price (either per icon or a package price). Thanks! Marc
Hello Marc. Before you shell out tons of money looking for brand new icons, I would love to have a little chat with you. I have the skills and tools to make icons for your application from scratch, but I also happen to have thousands of icons licensed under licences that allow me to modify and redistribute/sell them. If I could see the icons you currently use I would have a good idea if there's a large overlap between the current set, and the set you'd require. I recommend you check out the Tangoproject and use their icon guidelines as a reference for quality and consistency, also there is a great secondary guideline here: Basically things you desire in a set of icons are -consistent colour -consistent perspective -strong and unique silhouette -high contrast in colours, for those who are colour blind -consistest visual style -delivered in vector format for editing, scaling and resizing later as need be So, what I propose to you, is that before you pay a designer to make 200 brand new icons, show me what you've got, I'll show you what I've already got that you can use, and then you only have to pay me for the remaining modifications to retro fit the icons in, and for the few that we have to create from scratch. Here's a sample of the kind of icons I'm talking about when I say I've got some under a licence we can work with:
While I didn't not create these ones specifically (although I have used and modified them to fit other applications in the past, they were created in Inkscape, an open-source vector program. In fact, they are standard SVG format, so they can be read natively in Firefox, Opera and Safari without plugins. But, Adobe Illustrator can't handle them because it's weaker when it comes to colouring them. Inkscape computes colour as RGBa, with alpha being transparent. I could do a gradient from red100%, to green50%. It would never go green, but it would mix with green as it approached transparent. Where this is useful, and Illustrator totally lacks, is putting light highlights or subtle shadows on objects - which can add a TON of realism as you can see. Technically this is possible if you're clever in Illustrator, but it would require a lof of mask layers, and to use the sluggish Illustrator blurs. The reason these icons and the modifications I can make of them will stand out, is that so many artists are trapped by the limitations of Illustrator because it's the most popular app out there, that they can't break free and visualize icons like these unless they have used another app like inkscape in the past. Luckily, and as I'm sure you might have picked up by now, I have and use both, each according to their strengths, and am highly proficient in the use of both, as well as having a solid understanding of not only the program, but the theory behind the vector formats and colour systems I use. This knowledge (which you'll unlikely find in even most self-proclaimed advanced Illustrator users) comes from the fact that SVG is an open standard written by the W3C (who make HTML and CSS and Javascript standards too) and so you can actually delve in and learn how the file format itself works. If you know how, you can even manually edit the code of the vector file (like a website). This kind of functionality is strictly inaccessible in Adobe Illustrator, and so unless you have been on the development team at Adobe, nobody possibly CAN have that knowledge unless they look at the development information from Inkscape, which is open-source and freely available. The icons I have pictured here are the Oxygen Icon set, licensed under the LGPL which allows sale and modification, provided the changes are further released as LGPL and you give credit for the work others have done. This shouldn't be a problem, and it does not require your entire software to be under an open-source license (as the GPL license would have). So it should be easy and painless to integrate existing icons, and modify or create from scratch the missing icons for your entire software program in considerably shorter time than creating even a simple icon set from scratch, or trying to look for an icon set that has all of the icons you need pre-made. PM me if you would like me to work on the job, I would provide as deliverables the icons in the final format you requested, as well as a copy of the LGPL under which the work would be licensed, and also the vector sources for all of the icons (which can be edited at any later date for free using Inkscape). All I would require to start work would be all of the current icons and either a copy of your software or screenshots/video of every icon as it is seen in your software so I can better understand the placement or logical flow of the icons. Contact me to discuss prices and deadlines, or for samples of design work I have done already. A limited portfolio of my work is available at tomhodgins.com and I also have some more recent work I could send to you if you desired it. Good luck!