BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Last year we took on one of our biggest projects yet, working on the new Smashing Magazine re-design. In this post we’ll look at some of the elements we designed for the project, many of which nobody has seen before.

The Brief

The brief was for a re-fresh or update of the current design, rather than an overhaul. They wanted things to be crisper, cleaner and more together – but a lot of the elements needed to stay, so that it still had a familiar feel & felt like something that people were used to.

Launch Project Photo Gallery

Not everything we created made it in to the live site. So we’ve decided to show a gallery of some screen-shots & previews of our involvement in the process.

We’ve put together some photographs of various ideas and work in progress from the early stages of the design. The photos were taken during the design process, and there has been various changes made since, by both ourselves and the Smashing team. But it does show an exclusive look at the early stages of the design process.

Wireframe & Moodboard

The first stage was to work on a wire-frame & mood-board, we showcased our initial ideas on a combination of both. Presenting some solid ideas like this backed up by examples and solid reasons it makes the start of any project much easier.

Things That Never Made it

Since handing over the project to the Smashing Magazine team a lot of changes have been made. So a lot of the work we did never actually saw the light of day, which is why this post has been made and also why we’ve uploaded a Gallery.

Some of the things, in our opinion look better in earlier versions than they do on the live site. But at the same time there’s a lot of good that came from the client feedback and a lot of improvements have been made.

In my honest opinion, the current live site is in need of a little fixing up. We’ve been in touch with the Smashing Magazine team about some of the changes they’ve made, and put forward some improvement ideas of our own. Whether things will change I’m not sure, as we’re no longer actively involved in the project, but we have kept in touch with the team – and shared our honest feelings with them.

A quick look at some early details

Here’s a quick look at some details we quite liked, but we never got to use, for one reason or another. Even though they weren’t used they were a starting point for changes for both us and the Smashing Mag team.

We also worked with our good friend Pasquale D’Silva again on this project, he provided the character Illustrations for the about us pages. The characters were later used by the team for other things, but never as we originally planned it as part of a “meet the staff’ feature (above).

Speaking of Pasquale

As mentioned the characters we’re made by Pasquale D’Silva. We came up with the idea of having him draw each of the staff members to use on the about us page. Something that the clients loved. Here’s a preview of the 4 brilliant characters he came up with.

The Experience In Conclusion

Working on such a huge part of the design community was always going to be a challenge. It was a huge honour to be involved with the team and the project and all in all I’m proud of the work we did on the project.

As with any project there is always things I wish could have been different, but on the whole we’re happy with the work we put into the project and how things looked when we were done, and it really was such a massively fantastic project to have been involved in.

Every now and then we all come across a designer who takes us by surprise, and reminds us what it means to truly be a creative person. This is exactly how I felt when nearly 2 years ago I came across the work of Pasquale D’Silva.

Although illustration and animation aren’t really things I do, the vibe that comes from Pasquale, and the level of creativity he keeps up is something we can all related to and respect.

When you stumble across somebody so creative in this industry it’s always a good idea to talk to them, and if their skills can work for you, work with them. I hadn’t really planned to find an illustrator to work with, but once I saw his work I just had to find an excuse to work with him. And in the past our previous meetings have worked out very well.

Having worked with such an interesting character, and got to enjoy his work over the past year or two I felt it would be nice for me to share some of his work with you guys and perhaps open some eyes to a guy who keeps me very intrigued, blows my mind and inspires me on a daily basis.

In this post I will be showcasing some of the fantastic work from Pasquale, and tying in some interview questions that I put to him. Plus read through to find out how to win a cool t-shirt from Pasquale.

Work of Pasquale D’Silva

Before we get in to the interview I’ve chose a selection of Pasquale’s work that I would like to share with you. More of his work will be placed throughout the interview.

01. You are clearly a creative guy. Can you tell us where did your interest in illustration & animation came from?

The plan was to be a mechanical and micro-electronic engineer. I wanted to build neat robots to fight each other to the death, and send things to the moon. Unfortunately that required a lot of boring math, and in my senior year, I swapped all my courses out to arts courses. It freaked my careers councilor out for sure..

I’ve always loved drawing and making funny things. I used to draw really weird things and write wacky, crudely illustrated stories when I was in Primary school.

I only seriously thought about animation & illustration as a career after watching Disney B-Rolls for hours on end in early high-school.

It was wonderful learning that there were a few adults who could actually make a living drawing animals, candlesticks, monsters & funny looking people for kids and adults (big kids) all day. I didn’t want a regular ‘boring’ job, so I just stuck my hands into drawing & animation!

After sending in a showreel of work to a local animation & effects studio, they were nurturing enough to take me in and train me up. It turned into a job working on a couple of animated television series, where I learned a lot of very valuable information.

02. What was the motivation for you to pull out of university & focus on your freelance work? Has the decision worked out for you?

University was a struggle. Not for grades – I was happily sitting at ‘honors’. I had been working for an animation studio before entering university, so jumping into it felt really sheltered.

Nobody was brutal enough with critique, and the bar was set pretty low. For something as subjective as animation, applying an academic set of criteria was almost ridiculous! It felt too mechanical, and it was hard to feel motivated to work on neat things.

I left at the end of ’08 and haven’t looked back. That being said, I am still glad that I got to go to university and collaborate with friends. I ended up making a really fun little short, and had some great times sharing and learning from each other.

Freelance was doing great, and the north (America & Canada) presented a plethora of opportunities. I’ve been working with many new faces up here.

Everything is exciting and fresh! I think the best thing that came out of the big move to Vancouver was ending up in a place saturated with creative people, and being independent!

03. How is your time mostly spent? Is there a balance between your illustration work, and your animation work? Which of the two would you say you prefer spending time on?

For the most part, I’m Illustrating as Freelance work & animating for personal projects. Since animation is so laborious, it requires a pretty large budget to get rolling- so they are the more occasional pieces.

When I’m animating, I don’t get to spend as much time as I’d like examining and working each drawing; but when I’m illustrating I don’t get to see it move and come to life.  So for that reason, I like to keep a pretty even split between the two.

04. If you had to choose some work that would define you as a designer what would it be. Talk us through the work and what makes it a perfect representation of you & your work.

Looking back at my art even months ago, I see a lot of change. In months from now, I’d probably pick something different, but I guess right now I’d say my on going ‘freak-a-day’ project (which has been daily sometimes in the past months).

I love pushing out really quick & loose drawings. I find that I learn a lot more about my quirks from spontaneous reflex drawing: Freak a Day.

After drawing studies, natural patterns occur in the choices of lines I’ll put down, so it’ always nice to have a collection of the looser sketches. Sometimes the freaks will come from ideas I dream up, or sometimes they’ll just emerge from a squiggle that I’ll use as the base shape.

05. You always have a great use of colour in your Work. Where does this understanding come from & do you have any tips you could share?

I find colour to be very non-formulaic, even though there are a lot of theories which help as a guide. I love just looking at nature for inspiration. Real life is the best thing to learn from. Don Shank & Lou Romano (Two of my favourite layout artists) are a big inspiration.

They develop the colour scripts & layout art for many of Pixar’s films by going out into the field with art supplies, and just slapping studies together. I think that colour is incredibly important to nail down in all types of design, be it web, print or animated! It really helps to establish mood & character.

If I have any useful tips for colour- I’d say it’s just all about examining what’s around you and studying what occurs naturally!

06. You’ve recently opened a shop! Talk us through what you’re doing, and what you have planned for the shop.

Yes! I am really excited that people can now own a physical copy of my art for their walls or chests! I just started working with a great screen printer; Sage Screen-printing who uses traditional methods to hand-press prints.

I was actually at his studio while the paints were mixed and pressed for my first line of limited edition tees! Being hand controlled, we got to control every fine detail from the colour contrast, to checking that every layering of paint registered properly.

I think having prints made in the traditional fashion is so rewarding. After seeing what goes behind it, I really fell in love with the method, and plan to roll out a lot more art designed for press.

It’s a great feeling being able see your art in a more tactile form than just on screen!

07. It seems that friends & collaborations with designers play a big part in your life and your work. Introduce some of these people to us and share what you’ve been up recently.

Collaborating with my friends and other artists is a blast. It means that I get a diversity of projects to work on, & get to make things even better than I could have produced on my own.

I just started co-hosting a weekly show with Timmy Allen (from Rev3′s Film Riot) & Nick Campbell from GreyScaleGorilla on motiongraphics & animation called Keyframe.

We hold a round table discussion about news, questions & breaking down pieces of work. We just finished our second episode, and hope that we can make each episode even better than the last!

I’m also working on a live action x animation film with my good videographer friend Josh Knepper. It’s called Packed.

Right now we are trying to develop our own methods to blend effects work with illustration & animation. We recently did a comprehensive rewrite of the script, & are now testing the final effect proofs in the coming week or two. For some reason, we also require a full body, skin-tight,  green-screen suit; so we’ll be getting into some spandex soon…

My store system was built by my friend Brian Reavis who is an amazing wizard of code. I recently flew out to visit him & his equally talented brother and started building a crazy project that involves robots & twitter. – But that’s still under wraps!

…and of course there are the numerous collaborations I’ve had with you here at Function, Illustrating fun characters to share & more recently, the pieces put together for the redesign of Smashing Magazine!

08. Could you please explain why you have so many quick sketches or doodles uploaded online & what their importance is?

Animation & Illustration is my passion. Though I absolutely enjoy making art for other people, it’s still work! I chill out making art as well, so working on my own projects is meditative. I love to push together fun little pieces to share with the world, and to add to my portfolio. I’m always working on something new in order to diversify my work showcase as much as possible. There are no limits when you are working for yourself.

09. What tools, online or offline are most important to your work-flow.

All of my drafting is usually traditionally planned (Pencil on Paper). Getting it into digital is the easy part! I develop most of my drawings on paper, and then vector the scans using Adobe Flash or Illustrator.

It’s kind of un-orthodox, but I find the bendable line tools & interactivity between drawing elements in Flash to be so much more intuitive than Illustrator. I spend most of my time vectoring in Flash & then accomplishing the rest of the polish in Illustrator.

Raster work is produced with Autodesk Sketchbook, Corel Painter, or Photoshop depending on the aesthetic I am after. I animate with Flash, Autodesk Maya, & composite with After Effects.

It used to be an extremely tedious process taking pencil sketches into digital through scanning, and re-inking the the linework. I recently added a Wacom Cintiq to my work-flow, and it’s really shaved down hours upon hours from my process.

Being able to use the original marks placed on canvas is a godsend! Sketchbook is Cintiq’s best friend. It’s so nice being able to doodle quick scribbles with the pencil brushes. All of the characters in my Freak-a-day set were drawn using it!

10. You definitely have a good balance of fun and professionalism about you. Do you think this is important for your client relationships and collaborations with other designers.

I’d like to think that it’s one of my stronger assets! I think establishing a friendly and comfortable relationship with a client is a wonderful thing. The relationship will be incentive for a client to want to keep hiring a designer for future projects, whilst the designer can feel comfortable working on a project.

I’m often selective about clients, and make sure that working together will really benefit the both of us.

Keeping it lighthearted is important, especially in an industry as loopy and fun as animation/character design. A good personality reflects pretty strongly on your work. Better work comes from the projects which are least stressful.

11. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, anything you’d like to add?

My pleasure Liam.  Thanks for talking to me and letting me share my thoughts! I just want to say that I am always looking for fresh new projects & people to work with. Come hang out on my site, have a look around in my shop, and check out some of the fun projects I am working on!

Win Pasquale’s work on your Chest!

Pasquale has been kind enough to let one of you guys have one of his t-shirts delivered to your door absolutely free. Simply post a comment to win, remembering to enter your email address, so we can contact you (only if you win) – One word posts won’t be accepted so make it a valuable comment & feel free to share the competition via Twitter and other modern contraptions.

For a better view of what you will be winning, with sizes check the details out.

One winner will be picked randomly. The contest will only run until Monday November 16th 2009: 4pm GMT. So make sure to get your entry in quickly.

Stay in Touch with Pasquale

There’s a few ways to keep up to date with Pasquale. Let’s quickly run through them! His Twitter. Personal Blog. Flickr stream & Tumblr. Make sure to check out the new Shop and his work Portfolio.

Your blog post thumbnail will play a big part in how your users see your website, and how they navigate it. A well designed post thumbnail can really engage your visitors and help encourage them to explore your website.

Examples of Post Thumbnails

A very Unique Solution on Tutorial9

Introducing, a true master at making an interesting post thumbnails, Mr David Leggett. In this case a very bold & unique use of the content (icons) to create a memorable thumbnail.

Clean and crisp thumbnail on AppStorm

A very clean lighting effect in the background with a modern font & great colors to catch attention. Notice the 1pixel white drop shadow on the word “interview” – a simple & effective approach.

Keeping your Photographs Relevant (UX Booth)

Another fantastic example from David Leggett. This time he’s not relied on his skill in Photoshop, he’s simply relied on that old favorite the photograph. A good looking, and relevant photo perfects your content perfectly.

Clever use of Screenshots on Obox

This example by Obox shows how placement of the elements on the thumbnail can generate interest. You get a sneak peak at the content with some cleverly placed screenshots with a good background lighting effect and the all important text which looks fantastic and the contrast is perfect.

Picking the Perfect Image, Courtesy of DesignShard

Again, Keeping your image relevant is a must. And in this example another photo, but it has 3 things: simplicity, visual impact and relevance.

OutlawDesign Makes the Thumbnails Part of the Design

Two great examples on Outlaw Design Blog. We see a stunning Photograph on one, and on the other one of the logo’s from inside the post has been chosen for the thumbnail, a great visual impact.

You can also start to see how the blog design benefits from showcasing multiple good looking thumbnails. The post thumbnails really become part of the design in this case.

UxBooth again with Text Over Photographs

Using fantastic looking text on top of some really appealing images can be a real hit. This is a great example of strong typographic elements on top of a crisp & relevant photograph.

WebDesignLedger Improve Exploration

Apart from looking great, a relevant & good looking thumbnail can help visitors navigate through your posts. This is particularly important if you have a lot of posts on your blog or site.

WebDesignerDepot Keep it Simple & Effective

If you are lucky enough to be writing about something that includes a lot of great looking content, show off this content. It’s not just a quick solution but a very effective one, and again it would help people who are scanning your content understand what the post includes.

Fubiz Lets the Image do the Talking

Layout can play a big part in the effectiveness of your thumbnails. This example uses quite a large image with a simple line of text. For me these are very useful, especially when the image is very pretty!

Fubiz does more with their Thumbnails

Having such interesting post thumbnails gives you the chance to experiment with alternative ways of navigating content, like this fantastic gallery view on Fubiz.

Build Internet combine Photography & Text

Text on the top of a photo once again, just another example of how this can work so very well. Remember our quality tips too when putting together any graphics.

Good Thumbnail Positioning on PSDTuts

The layout of your thumbnails is important. This style (which I first saw used across the Envato sites) seems to be very popular with bloggers.

WebDesignerWall Uses CSS to Style Thumbnails

A Simple use of a gradient & some nice typography. What I like about Web Designer Wall is that each of their thumbnails has the white edge with a gray border, it gives your images a bit of consistency and having a default style on images can make them fit in with your site a lot better.

Imeem have also styled their Thumbnail Border

Every thumbnail on the imeem website looks like it’s almost a photo sitting on top of the page. There actual photo does not have this effect on it, the frame around the image has been made & just sits behind, this makes your thumbnail look as if it’s it’s part of the frame, but really it’s all separate.

It’s a easy way of styling multiple images and leaves you open to change the style of the border, when you update your web design.

Methods of Making Creative Thumbnails

Summing up your post into one image, and making it look attractive is a big part of catching the interest of readers who are exploring your homepage. It has also become more common to see thumbnails next to blog title on a homepage, rather than just text. Layout of the image is important too, finding the perfect place to put your image is an art in itself. Sometimes a full image is used, sometimes a small thumbnail, anything from a photo to a sketch or full vector illustration, the ability to create so many different things should be your biggest advantage!

You have a fresh canvas with each blog post, you don’t need to keep constancy with your thumbnails & post images, each one can be a new work of art, a chance to express yourself and a chance to back up what you are writing with your creativity.

There are a variety of ways capturing & creating the perfect thumbnail for your post, but it’s important that the image compliments the post, keeps relevant and isn’t too complicated – we’re going to explain a select few examples in further detail now.

Unique & Custom Graphics

Without doubt this would be the most time consuming way of creating good looking thumbnail/introduction images for your post, but as you will see it’s clearly worth the time when you get it right. This process would involve looking at the post as a product, and the post thumbnail as an advert for that product, you need to find creative ways to best showcase that product, using a mix of various design methods.

A closer Look at Tutoria9′s Unique & Bold Style

David Leggett, the fantastic designer behind Tutorial9 has included some important techniques to style his thumbnail, a nicely executed drop shadow, a background lighting effect that helps to build depth, and also some blur is applied on some elements to also build depth and give the image something different visually. David has also kept some basic ideas in mind, such as contrast (light on dark) and he’s included a tag-line.

I think this example is a great use of space, and the fact David has made his image posts such a big feature on his site gives him room to experiment & create something outstanding each time. Have a think about what you can take from this and apply to your next blog thumbnail, remember to keep Quality in mind.

Relevant & Interesting Photography

Photographs have always been a very pure and captivating way of getting a point across or sharing an emotion. They can keep those same attributes when being used in you thumbnails. Remember to spend some time, either taking images yourself, browsing stock photo websites or searching flickr for captivating images that the author has released under the creative commons agreement. *Use Advanced search for Creative Commons settings

Example of Relevant Photographic Thumbnail

This Article on Simplemom is a fantastic example of getting your images absolutely right. The image wasn’t taken by the author of the article, but it couldn’t get any more relevant to the topic. This just goes to show how taking the time to find a perfect image is well worth it, and a clever photograph really helps to compliment your content & invite readers to your post.

Other than symbolizing the content of the article very well it’s also a pretty image visually, I like the feeling of depth and the contrast with the colors and the whole composition just ticks all the right boxes. Remember if your original photo doesn’t have all of these things, some simple touch up’s in Photoshop wouldn’t go a miss.

Creativity with Screenshots

Many posts online these days (this one included) have a lot of images throughout. If you’re writing about something that exists on a website or blog you might have some screenshots to support your content. If you do a small amount of work in Photoshop you can make these screenshots worth of a thumbnail.

Fine Example of Using Screenhots as your Thumbnail

In this example by Andrew, he’s used a screenshot as the backrgound to the image. Rather than a standard screenshot he has cleverly built up a sense of 3D and depth – first by creating a lighting effect, and then placing the screenshot at an angle, to give the feel that it’s not just a flat image. He’s brilliantly continued this theme by placing a really nice graphic on top of a post-it note.

I really like how Andrew has built something up from nothing, and with a little bit of effort he’s created something truly interesting that works.

Multiple Uses for your Thumbnails

Using thumbnails gives you the advantage of using them in a variety of ways, and in a variety of places throughout your website. Having the choice to do what you want with them means you can be as creative, or as straight forward as possible. Let’s look at a few solutions.

Featured Posts Slider

GOOD is a fantastic website design all in all. But the featured posts with thumbnails are a particularly beautiful element of their website. The thumbnails are very good looking, but the layout and the use of a scrolling showcase transform them from just being beautiful, to being incredibly useful.

Gallery of Posts

The Autoblog website has a lot of new articles each day, so drawing attention to posts can be hard and things quickly move off the front page, so having a gallery style feature area allows for you to keep interest on a article long after it has been publishes. It also improves interactivity, and although I’m not completely in love with the design, it works very well and could look very nice.

Another good example of this would be Fubiz (as featured earlier in the post).

Make Lists easier to Scan

For sites that have a lot of content listing other articles, be it popular, featured or recommended etc, is quite an important part of internal traffic and exploration by users. Sometimes these lists can look a little un-inviting, especially if long. Adding thumbnails to your lists could be a great solution.

Draw Attention to Related Posts

Thumbnails with related posts not only look great, but provide something stimulating and fresh to look at, and gives the user something to do once they have finished reading your post. Without doubt it’s a smart way of drawing and keeping attention on your articles

Think about the Positioning on your Blog

Aside from using in galleries, sidebars and below your content for related posts, you need to get the positioning of your blog post right from the very beginning. Think about in which pages your thumbnail is going to be used, and how in you can best display the image to benefit both the content and the user.

Example Layout Mock-Ups for you

From the examples on this article I’ve created some quick mock-ups of popular layout and positioning of thumbnails which could spark some ideas for your own blog. These are just quick examples but illustrate only a handful of successful ways you could integrate thumbnails into the layout of your blog posts.

Full (Fixed) Width

Using the full column width gives you a lot of space to use, and there is a good balance between content and the image. The down side is that it doesn’t look great on fluid width sites.

Next To Title

Your images tend to be smaller in these places, but the positioning is great & it makes scanning through the posts very easy.

Next to Title Right

Another fantastic solution, I think this one looks great and keeps your title in line with your text.

Thumbnail within Content

To keep focus on the title you could move the thumbnail to a more obvious place. In this position the image is part of the content, and the text can wrap around it or go along side it. A good solution but for me not always the best looking.

Thumbnail within Content (Right Side)

Same advantages and disadvantages as mentioned above. Although this one doesn’t break up the layout on the text as much and for me sometimes is a better solution then the one above.

Full Image with Small Paragraph

If the content is visual based & you have a lot of good photos or images you could use a full image could be a huge hit. Trying to describe how cool something looks is nowhere near as good sa just show how good it looks, and that’s a big plus for this layout option.

Final Thoughts & Tips

The point of this post was not to just simply show you some good looking screenshots, we intended to make you think about why you should be using thumbnails on your blog, and show you how a little time & effort with your post thumbnail.

This is not something for designers specifically, it’s more for content writers and webmasters to start thinking about how and why then can help their users by either putting some time in yourself, or hiring somebody who can create such images for you.

• Keep it Relevant
Relevant images will compliment your content and help users to navigate your site if you integrate them well.

• Don’t be afraid to Pay for Quality
Whether it’s paying for good quality images, or hiring a designer to spend a little time working on a creative thumbnail for a post.

• Make sure you give Credit
If you use an image from flickr for example, it’s always nice to give a link back to the original source and author.

• Think about your Layout
If you’re going to add thumbnails to your posts have a good think about where you are going to place them.

• Think of creative ways to use them
Once your blog posts each have a cool thumbnail start thinking of interesting ways you can get your users to interact with your content  – use your thumbnails to your advantage.

Resources

iStockphoto.com | Loads of quality Images
GraphicRiver | Various Icons, Illustrations & Stock Imagery
Dreamstime | Big collection of premium Images
Sxc.hu | Free images, beware that these images are often over-used
StockVault | Quality free images
Flickr | A link to Flickr Creative Commons search
Photoshop Action for Screenshots | Tutorial that could be used for Thumbnails
Using Images to Take Your Posts to a New Level | Fantastic Video & Post
How To Find Free Photos for your Blog | Great tips and resources

We’ve recently had the pleasure once again of working with Collis Ta’eed and the team at Envato, a company we admire – and one full of creative & down to earth guys – running a very successful network of sites. Having them use your icons on their site(s) is one thing, but working with them is a true honor.

Here’s our write up of our involvement in the recent re-design, our thoughts on it – and our early design drafts for Collis.

A look at the new Envato Marketplaces

There’s a lot of people to please when you’re re-designing such a huge network of sites, and a lot of pressure on the team behind it, it calls for some creative thinking and a fresh look at things. The first time I saw a near finished Envato Marketplaces re-design I knew right away that I was looking at something that people were going to love, and I think that’s probably a big hurdle when you’re making a big change to something people are used to.

Anyway, here’s some screenshots for you to gawp at first!

What Work Did We Do?

Well, we’re going to show you some of our early mock-ups that we sent to Collis months ago. Now I must explain, you’re going to look at the mock-ups and wonder why our drafts look nothing like the final designs showcased above. And you would be right to be curious. On the face of things it’s hard to see the relation, but I can assure you we played our part(s).

The Interesting thing about this Re-Design

Before you look at the mock-ups then, it’s probably interesting to know how Collis went about the project. He approached 3 designers, myself, Aaron Lynch & Kai Loon informing us of his master plan to give the Marketplace a refresh. He wanted a new perspective on the design and some ideas from outside of his own head.

Our brief was to create something from a fresh pair of eyes, and offer something different to Collis. We had a lot of creative freedom as we we’re always aware that Collis was going to take our designs and create something himself, we just had to offer him something different that he could take away, take elements from – or simply just use them as inspiration. For me it was a clever approach on Collis’ part, it offered him a variety of styles from a variety of designers that he could take and shape into a fantastic design.

Our Early Design Drafts

Now I wouldn’t normally share screenshots of work that didn’t follow through into the final live version, but this was such a unique and different approach to a re-design process that I don’t mind sharing some screenshots with you all. Keep in mind these snippets are from 3 different design concepts.

You can see from the details above the overall level of finish and quality. Something that Envato uphold throughout all of their websites, but other than that I wanted to try something that I purposely wouldn’t normally do, rather than trying to create that typical Envato look I though that Collis would much rather appreciate something that was different, even if it wasn’t ever really going to be used as the base of a design there’s various elements that I offered in a different light.

Full Screenshots of the designs (if you must)

Concept 1 – A polished finish with a minimalistic approach.
Concept 2 – A slight hint at texture and injection of colour.
Concept 3 – A lot of colour & big bold typography.

Looking through the final live version of Flashden for example I can see things that could have been made as a result of my designs, but there’s a lot of it that never crossed over – but that was never really the point of this project.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of our Icons, that are on sale – are being used throughout the marketplace, and we just love seeing our icons used, especially when they are executed so well. Feel free to share in the comments where you are using our icons.

Custom Icon Design

One thing we did complete from start to finish was a re-vamp of the Envato badge icons that are used throughout the Marketplace, on profiles & portfolio’s of all of the users. There was already a full set of icons that were being used, so we had to touch-up and re-draw the ones that worked well enough, but then come up with a completely new concept for many of the icons.

Why not check out all of the badges out for yourself.

Now Go Check It Out

Now that the site is all new and shiny it’s the perfect time to sign up, if you haven’t already. *Note Signing up an account will give you access to all of the network sites. There’s a lot of offer across the Network, everything from Icons to Sound & Video files, a truly remarkable network of sites, and a huge pleasure to work on.

Follow Me

You can now follow authors on Graphic River & the other Marketplaces. It’s a great way to keep up to date with your favorite authors and the recent updates are shown very neatly on the front page for you. It’s a fantastic way to keep your eyes on what is going on.

Graphic River Updates
Twitter Updates

Follow the other people mentioned:

@collis @aaronlynch and @kailoon – *all well worth following!

A really great set of icons for free. Something that you’ve seen before on this blog, but I think this most recent free set shows just how far I’ve come since the first set, just over a year ago now. This new set of icons was made exclusively for WooThemes & with their help we’ve proud to offer you this fantastic set of icons for absolutely nothing!

With this set we’ve gone for a more refined, Mac OSX style Icons (almost) – which seem to be really popular with web designers recently. We’ve also gone for a (smaller than usual) 32 x 32px size, with a few of them available also at 16 x 16px. The pack includes 178 transparrent .png files.

To anybody who was confused by the title image, it’s not your fault. I was trying to use the icons in a statement, you see the Icons spell out the line below… Ahh never mind! I’ll stick to normal image previews from now on!

See & Grab the Icons

Take a look, let us know what you think. Download links are below the preview and comments are welcome too. This set is completely free to use, just make sure you give credit – details of which are below!

Share These Icons

Please make sure you read this before using or sharing online. Thanks.

If you find these icons useful we’d like you to pass them on to other who you think might appreciate the set. The URL to share is: http://www.woothemes.com/2009/09/woofunction/.

Important: Even though we won’t force you, we appreaciate if you link to this article when sharing the icons. This icon set is released on the GNU General Public License.

Download The Icons

The icons are being hosted at WooThemes, so head on over to the Download page and download them, don’t forget to leave a comment and let us know what you think of them too.

There’s a lot more Icons on offer

We’ve got a lot more icons available for download, so if you liked these you are in for a treat. Keep an eye on our icons portfolio for more sets from us. We’re happy to get your ideas and thoughts which will help for future icon releases.