Glass Icons – The First Class Design Items
Glass icons play a great role in the modern web page design making it look professional.Web icons bring clean look to your site making its design eye-catching. Nevertheless this effect should be reasonably used because it can be harmful for the design perception.
Glass icons are very important feature of the present day web design making it look professional and clean, and contributing to its promotion. Glass web icons is the sign of the mac-like design but also they get recognition among other brands as well.
Web icons with glass effect can be created easily but you should keep in mind that passion for the glass style shouldn’t be turned into the glass fever.
Web icons impart classy and clean look to your web site making its design eye-catching and professional. Though this effect should be reasonably used since it can be harmful for the design perception.
Today glass icons are incredibly well-known elements of website or blog decor. This glass icon style is so effective thing that can easily impart the perfect, clear and professional look to your web site, presentation or desktop and embody a kind of the “Web 2.0” spirit.
Glass icons usage pro and contra.
Do the elaborate and intricate look of the web icons designed in the glass style turn your brain and you think that it is a hard task to do this? You shouldn’t be confused – it is pretty obvious that the process of their creation is rather simple. Glass web icons can normally be designed within a few minutes with Photoshop, Illustrator or Corel software, so it’s not a big deal even for the newbies in the design sphere. All that you need is some helpful tutorial, some skills of working with these pieces of software program and the images you are going to turn into glass web icons.
The glass effect with all its glass buttons, tabs and rollovers is considered to have beenborrowed from the Apples OSX operating system style and copied by Windows (especially Windows Vista). Some may argue that glass icons are so strongly related to Apple product that the glass-styled elements make people think of the completely different brand which makes the usage if this type of web icons worthless, nevertheless the advantages of the glass icons style are obvious.
One of the most important feature of the present day web-site is social bookmarking web icons. If you’d like to have got a great advantage for the webpage promotion use eye-catching glossy icons for this purpose. Attractive social bookmarks raise the possibility of the site visitors clicking on them and the number of the clicks increases correspondingly. So due to this fact you’ll be able to promote your content more effectively.
Web icon with glass effect as one of the types of the glossy-styled icon.
Glass icons can be viewed as an independent icon style though it is logical to assume that glass style is just one of the types of the shiny, glossy design.
Other types of the glossy web icons design that can be marked out:
-glass icons;
-metal icons;
-glass-metal icons;
-transparent icons.
Glossy icons can be aqua, crystal, plastic etc. and at the same time transparent and half-transparent.
Also, there are partly glass and partly stained icons meaning the objects contain some glassy or stained elements.
Glass web icons as well as other types of icons are usually depicted with reflecting. It is one of the standard features of the “Web 2.0” icons. You may find various tutorials on the web instructing to make vertical reflection effect for web icons.
The pure look of glass icons makes navigating through the internet pages playful and attracts a lot of people. In the Internet sources you may find numerous tutorials concerning the ways of creating such neat web icons.
Creation of glass web icons.
Adobe Photoshop is the most well-known software for creating web icons. Photoshop is becoming more and more flexible and multitasking software for design. These days it allows to create almost all visual effects used for the graphic design. A great amount of the prominent web designers and illustrators create their great web icons designs with this software. The ability to combine pixel painting with vector tool for creating glass icons, buttons, characters etc. is the most important feature of the latest Photoshop versions.
The easiest way to design glass icons is to make the “glass” layer overlap the image. With a help of the “eraser” tool you will be able to build an empty diagonal line through the image. You are supposed to proceed using eraser for making adjustments to the glass layer until the moment when the glass effect repeats the contour of the icon. It should kind of the glass haze in the opposite sides. After this procedure complete the further adjustments should be applied.
Professional web designers should use this effect carefully and remember that glass-fever may look ridiculous. Bear in mind glass icons should be combined with taste so that the website style could remain professional and reserved.
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Stan Lem is not a rookie in writing for the web – he started out about five years ago and took special involvement in the area of website design and web development – more specifically web icons and glass web icons.