Designing an Icon a Day
“This year is the year. The year when I actually take my new year’s resolution to its completion”. That’s what I tell myself every year. Last year I started a new resolution: post an article a month on this blog. Well… that went great as you can see, although it was a nice experience being on the first page of Hacker News for a brief period.
I did try my best, but sometimes life hits you like a ton of bricks. Feeling swarmed I opted to dedicate my spare time to my open source projects on Github, leaving this blog rather sad and empty.
Anyway, since I’m a creature of habit, I am here telling myself “This year is the year. the year when I actually take my new year’s resolution to its completion”. Since I’m an idiot I’m about to pick a challenge worth 365 daily efforts instead of 12 monthly ones.
Before illustrating this year’s challenge, I’ll take a step back to explain my reasoning behind this. If you happened to read one of my previous post you might know that I’m an iOS developer at heart, and sometimes I take a stab at UI design and Rails development. I feel like my iOS tools are moderately sharp (although I need to catch up on WatchKit and start taking Swift more seriously, i.e.: start using it for production code), unlike my designer’s skills, that definitely need some polish. That’s why this year’s resolution will be covered by my favorite design tool, Sketch.
Designing an icon a day
The other day I stumbled upon this project. A really simple idea (to describe): design an icon a day. I love this concept, for one I’ll be able to practice designing vector shapes, and as icing on this slowly baked cake I’ll end up with a bunch of (hopefully) reusable icons. I was intrigued, so intrigued that I think this will be the perfect year-long project. I can already hear future-me screaming in pain, calling me an idiot. Brilliant.
How and where
I’ll be using Sketch, and my main source of inspiration will be, at first, random words from a word generator. I’ll be posting the icons on my Github’s profile, in this repository. The icons will be licensed under Creative Commons’s Attribution 4.0 International licence. The fun starts on January 1 2015. Future-me will hopefully stop this project on December 31 2015 maintaining a sizeable amount of sanity.
Untile next time.
I’m so going to botch this…