We Love Brisbane – Website Design » Design The World

Pros

Icon depth: There are many icons to choose from. Right now, there are about seven sets that are available on Iconbench. In total, there are more than 700 icons available. There is one set that is premium, but the rest are free. Many of the icons are pretty standard, so they are very versatile.

Pick and choose: like I said, it’s a bit of a pain to have to download a huge set of icons when you only need about 10 or 20. With Iconbench, I can pick whatever icons I want. I can also choose different icons from different sets, allowing me to mix and match. Or just stay in one set.

Can register: you do not need to create an account, but the option is available. I like this because immediately, you may only need a handful of icons. Registering saves your sets so you can go back and download similarly styled icons.

Cons

Limited downloads: unfortunately, you can only download 20 icons at a time. It is no big deal, because most times that’s about the amount you need. However, it would be nice to be able to download more just in case. I guess they countered this by allowing you to register and make changes to your sets.

Would like more creative control: this may be a shot in the dark, but as a designer I wanted to be able to do more. I wanted to be able to choose between square and circle, but I was unable to. Most of the effects were nothing spectacular. And when you download the icons, you only get the PNG file in one size. I was kind of hoping for more.

Background color irrelevant: I’m not sure if I did something incorrectly, but when I went to download my icons after playing with the styles, I seriously only got the white icon. There was no background but just the icon. I’m assuming it’s a beta bug.

Verdict?

All in all I think Iconbench has some great potential. I think the key here is to keep working with and being able to choose the icons you want. I’m hoping some things could open up stylistically for them.

Right now, it’s kind of a big waste because of the background color issue but if they can correct that, this has great potential to be a tool useful to every web designer.

Have you used Iconbench? What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.

Kitsch Me If You Can Case Study by Falcon White

Here we are today with another amazing case study by Falcon White, a designer based from Germany and this time he’s doing a Case Study about his Desktopography 2012 submission entitled Kitsch Me If You Can. Hope you’ll enjoy it!

For the Desktopography 2012 Exhibition I wanted to come up with a different kind of ‘80s inspired photo illustration. I wanted to do a really cheesy and kitschy nature scenery but at the same time a really colorful one. Something with a hint of fantasy. Rainbows and unicorns came into my mind. So why don‘t just throw some rainbow bride and my little pony into the ring and see what happens.

Also check out the Desktopography website for downloading a great load of beautiful wallpapers, initiated by Pete Harrison Desktopography.net .

For more information about Falcon White, you can visit his FalconWhite.de and by also give it a LIKE on Facebook.

Step 1

After buying the right photo material, I made a first compositing and started cutting out each horse.

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Step 2

I took the background photo, duplicated and scaled it to fill the white space.

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Step 3

Some unnecessary elements were erased quick and dirty and I started to add some landscape elements like the waterfalls, the mountains and some stone elements in the foreground area.

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Step 4

Different sky photos were blend together and formed the final sky. A picture of a beach with the right perspective helped to create the sandy ground for the horses.

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Step 5

Time to fit in a rainbow for the cheesy ‘80s vibe!

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Step 6

Some dust for the background area and of course the Desktopography logo combined with a waterfall came into play.

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Step 7

Last adjustments for the left horse with scaling and using the Puppet Warp tool to put it into a better position. The horns of the unicorns were done in Cinema 4D and we also used C4D to give them the right perspective. A cut out tree photo plus rotated duplicates placed upon the logo created the perfect nature feeling. Some birds also felt free to fly along the sky.

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Step 8

Time for more dust, contrasts, shiny and brighter parts. The unicorns went through a first round of dodge & burn. The horns became shadows and were adjusted to blend right in.

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Step 9

First color adjustments – some blue, red, yellow and green spots were thrown on this.

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Step 10

A lot of fill and adjustment layers later (hue/saturation, selective colour, channel mixer, colour balance..) the wallpaper became more colourful like a rainbow.

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Step 11

It was about time to let the unicorns shine. All three became an outer and inner white glow and some more painted highlights. The right brush set helped a lot to get a surreal starry sky and gave the top of each horn a higher kitsch factor.

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Step 12

In the last step, dust and scratches were removed and I added a Reduce Noise filter to get a smooth, nearly painted look. Finally the wallpaper was sharpened via Highpass and the edges were darken a little bit.

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