Tips: Make Icons Without Resources

How to Make Good Icons Without Textures or Brushes – in Photoshop
by Chelle (pockycrab)

Good icons are not always the ones slapped with billions of textures or decorated with brushes everywhere. However, there are tendencies for beginners to abuse those resources unwisely, resulting in crappy-looking icons and a super long list of sites in their credits (and some even barely care to credit).

Of course, using textures and brushes are not wrong – they can enhance a graphic greatly, and many good graphics designers use them a lot too. But actually there are many ways to keep your avatars/icons simple, while still being cool enough for people to use! As people often say, sometimes less is more.

(While this article is targeted at Photoshop users, others can still get some ideas from here and adapt it to the programs they use. I’ve picked some icons from other sites as examples – they may not be the best examples on earth, but they should give you some general idea of what I’m talking about.)

All right, here are some ideas you can think about and try:

1) Play with colors.
Interesting colors will make your graphics more pleasing to visitors’ eyes, and attract their attention. Even if you don’t use any text or brush, a picture can look better when its colors are adjusted well. It can also cover some ugliness of a low quality image. You can play around with these options:

-Curves (Ctrl+M)
-Desaturate (Ctrl+Shift+U)
-Gradients
-Hue & Saturation
-Layer blends
-Selective Color
-Anything else in the ‘Layer > New Adjustment Layer’ option.

Icons by Hime Designs and Refuted

> For gradients, put the gradients in a new layer above your image. Experiment with the layer blending styles, such as ‘Lighten’ or ‘Soft Light’ (usually they turn out good). Decrease the opacity if it becomes too shiny or dark. Don’t hesitate to erase some parts to make the original image looks clearer.

> Use selective color to control the colors in more detail. It takes more time than curves or hue & saturation, but there are more things you can do with it. You can make an image look softer, flat, bold, or only some colors are brightly visible.

> Desaturate, why not? Grayscale can look good on some images. Another idea is to duplicate the image to a new layer, desaturate it, then erase some areas to make some parts of the image still in color – for example, the characters’ eyes, clothes, or hair. This can also work otherwise if you want to (All is in color except some parts are in grayscale).

2) Cropping
Pick an interesting angle to crop for your icons. Avoid being too ordinary – you can try only showing the body of a character, leaving out the head out of the picture, or showing only half of the face… Or you can try duplicating the image and play with them to create an interesting effect. I can’t stress this enough – don’t be afraid to experiment!

> Play with Free Transform. Resize it, rotate it, flip it… Does it look better if it’s smaller, since you can see the whole image? Or is it better when it’s bigger, since you can see the details? Will it look more interesting if you rotate it a little? There are many possibilities for a single image.

Icons by Icon_Fall and Castanets

3) Beauty of the Negative Space
Basically, you’ll put the image at an area of the icon, and make the rest plain in color, usually black or white. It’s easier to do with transparent PNGs or images with a solid color as the background. While it can turn out too simple, it can also give out a strong effect. The subject doesn’t always have to be in the center, it can be at the corner or the side… up to you, really.

Icons by Candlejack and Amputatings

4) For Solid Color Backgrounds
Rather than only slapping an extracted image to a solid-colored background, try out more things to make it even more interesting.

A stroke effect can also be nice – In the layer style (marked with a circle with ‘f’ on it, located on the bottom of the layers window), choose ‘Stroke’. It’ll give a ‘border’ for the image. It’ll look ugly if you don’t extract the image well though. You can also try creating an irregular dashed/dotted border using the brush tool around the subject. Some other ideas include adding some brush, text, or tiny text to fill the empty spaces. You can also consider using a soft gradient for the background instead a solid color.

5) Abuse Photoshop to It’s Limit.
I mean, Photoshop already provides you with a range of brushes, patterns, gradients, and custom shapes. So be creative, and use them wisely!

6) Typography
Not all icons should have texts, but if you decided to place one, you better make it good. Pick a color that won’t clash with the background and is easy to read. Think twice for what you want to write and double-check it: typo is a big no-no. Be creative with your text! You can simply write a word like ‘Sophisticated’ or ‘FAIL!’, a few sweet words like ‘Simply missing you’ or ‘gonna kick your ass’, or an interesting quote (avoid overused quotes though).

Choose the correct font that can convey the right mood of the icon. You can explore many unique fonts at DaFont.com and many other sites that you can use. And lastly, place the text in the right place of the icon. A negative space is good for text, and a character’s face is not a very good idea to place a text. Experiment with layer styles and text arrangement such as rotating it.

An icon with only text and no images can also look interesting!

Icons by Razzberridust and Aerocharm

7) Tiny, tiny text!
They’re quite handy and easy to do. Reduce the font size around 3-5 pixels, and start typing randomly. Give enough space between each word and break up the text into several lines with different lengths to make it look better. Downloading a tiny text brush can be useful, but it is actually something you can do on your own.

*Note from Ani:
If you’re feeling lazy or want to try using layer blending modes, then there’s another way to make simple tiny text on one layer without having to type anything.

1) Make a new layer and take the pencil tool (right-click on brush tool, click on Pencil) and draw some horizontal 1-pixel lines at random lengths.
2) When you’re done, to go Filter -> Blur -> Motion Blur and blur it at 0 degree angle. (-90 if you’re doing vertical text.) Try adjusting the distance to get the right look. I usually use around 29.
3) Change the layer blending mode to Dissolve and adjust the Opacity until the tinytext looks right.*

8) Animation
If you’re blessed with Adobe ImageReady or other programs that can animate your icons, then you can use them. Don’t make complicated animations that involves many frames though, since it’ll make the file size huge and load slowly. Make a simple animation that’s interesting.

For example, you can make a dramatic action scene then stopped for a few seconds at the last frame followed by a text, or an animation showing a character blinking or talking continuously, or with their hair/clothes waving away due to the wind.

Icons byNeskaya.Net and Lunargullicons

***

Well, that’s it from me for now! There are still many ways to create simple but good icons, and here are just some ideas to get you started. Experiment with things, come up with your own original idea, and most of all – have fun! I hope you enjoyed reading this and hope it helps you somehow :) Feel free to drop a comment!