Sean Juárez Design

23 October 2010

Icons

Almost a year ago I jailbroke my iPod Touch. I did so mostly because I was sick of how grossly multicolored the home screen became as one acquired more and more apps. I wanted one unified look; I wanted to be able to quickly and cleanly navigate my iPod to find what I wanted. Having had some experience making icons for my Mac using CandyBar, I assumed the icon-making process for the iPod would be similar: simple and satisfying.

After a bit of googling I found WinterBoard. WinterBoard is an app available through Cydia, (the jailbroken app store,) that is used to apply themes to your iPod. While figuring out how the whole jailbreak/themeing process worked I stumbled upon a beautiful WinterBoard theme called Bluebird designed by David Lanham. I became a big fan of Lanham's work a few years ago when found a set of Mac icons he'd done. I was looking for those Mac icons, in fact, when I discovered his iPhone theme.

That Bluebird Theme started it all. Included with the download was a PSD file that was meant to be a template for making more Bluebird-style icons. Of course, having it all layed out for me right there in a neat, photoshop package was irresistible. I learned much about Photoshop, layer styles, and icon-making in general from studying that PSD and making some icons of my own.

One day I found myself quite fascinated with the concept of a Heads-Up Display, (or HUD,) and its potential application in the world. (I think it was some time spent playing Halo 3 that got my mind on the subject.) I spent a while staring at some images and YouTube videos when I decided I wanted to try and make a heads-up-display-looking theme for my iPod.

The result was this: My "HeadsUp" iPhone/iPod touch theme. Which brings me to the original purpose of my post—to display some icons that were recently added to the repertoire: Twitterrific, BubbleFREE Air Sharing, Spore, Labyrinth 3D, Doodle Jump, and Plants vs. Zombies.The overall look has been tweaked and updated as I've gone along, creating some discrepancies in the details. Some are not even finished, (well, one I guess,) in the case of the reMovem icon. Nevertheless, I'm quite proud to finally show these to the world. I hope to soon release the entire theme after I get a few more UI Images and apps themed. (Hopefully a retina display version will be in the works as well. :D) Until then I'll be posting frequently on it's status as it progresses. Let me know what you think!