Sketch is a great place to start realising concepts, and putting them into screens or layouts. My preference is to output as a 1024x1024 pixel iTunes master icon file that is then passed to another tool I use for app icon creation – Prepo. Having settled on a concept this can then be output in the resolutions and sizes you need for iOS as a canvas set. Simply put, Sketch is a great place to experiment and work iteratively and quickly. Fine tuning tools to tweak gradients and tones to give your icons polish is better than anything else I have used. Iterating concepts derived from drawings and Illustrator artwork has definitely been of value to me. A process in itself that warrants a separate article. The canvas / page option makes Sketch a great tool for app icon design. With multi resolution export options, pieces of artwork can be exported to different size formats in a few simple steps. Great for exploring options and narrowing down. You can organise groups of canvasses into pages.
Like Illustrator it offers (more easy I might add) the option to build documents with artboards, or canvasses. Now I have to admit, I was a late adopter of Sketch but after initial use it's established as a key member of my toolset. Vector editing capability in an editing environment that offered the control over colour, image and blending at a pixel level. Enter Sketch. What was needed was a tool that offered the best of both worlds. Yet to use Illustrator in place of Photoshop, to fine tune colour gradients and blend modes, while possible can be tricky. Not an ideal approach when all your master screens are created Roll forward a couple years and iPhone 6 drops with its screen resolution and you get what I mean. The optimal route was to create the largest format required and downsample to the other required sizes. As we moved into a new era of varied screen resolutions and artwork size requirements, Photoshop started to look a bit long in the tooth. It really was the only medium that offered the right tools for the job. With this relatively new component part of my process, Illustrator is still as important as it ever was in my design process for apps.īack in the day if you were bashing out icon concepts or screens, or doing anything at all at a pixel level with layers, you used Photoshop.
#QUARTZCODE PANTS CODE#
Using vector assets in illustrator, PaintCode generates bezier Swift code classes that are pulled in to any codebase I am working on. Roll in another tool, PaintCode which complements Illustrator beautifully. And given that a font file is just one big thing, a black box if you like, made it tricky to handle in version control. So the step of rasterisation was replaced with font creation. This gave me the flexibility of asset sizes for the various resolutions but made the process of managing font files a new headache. Initially the best option was to compile all my icons into a font file using Glyphs. XCode and the iOS SDK don't support SVG formats out of the box. The advent of multiple artboards made this much more straightforward. Yet with each icon or piece of artwork, having the varied resolutions in pixel format bulked everything out times three.Īpp thinning aside, this started to become tedious to manage.Ī newer approach was needed that capitalised on the vectors themselves. Artwork that was rasterised into the relative and sizes.
I've always used Illustrator to craft out such icons, create shapes and vector artwork.
It's a mature app - I've been using it for nigh on 20-odd years and Illustrator still has a growing feature set. The original vector manipulation tools and pathfinder sets are more than enough to create sets of icons for the UI or identity of apps. When it comes to creating in app assets like icons or vector artwork, Illustrator is still the boss of them all.
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