You heard it here first: there is no, there has never been, and there will never be a standard design process. Each and every designer has his own methods, tools and techniques. The steps detailed below describe roughly the process I followed to design Furfox.

Step 1: Sketching

Many designers can’t do without the ol’ pencil and sketchbook, and I am one of them. Out of the random concepts I have scribbled, this one seemed to be a viable starting point for a laid back and cute icon.

Step 2: Vector Tracing

The second step consists in scanning the sketch and tracing it in a graphic editor. This maneuver is optional, but I often resort to it when the design is too complicated to be easily reproduced using basic shapes. Also, all my icons start out as vectors in Adobe Illustrator.

For more about the differences between raster and vector graphics, check this article.

Step 3: Adding Vector Details

This step is all about adding details to the vector shapes achieved in the previous step. I admit that drawing vector fur can be irritating at times, but I got used to it thanks to my ephemeral experience with character design.

Step 4: Adding Colors

This is my personal favorite. Nothing beats the joy of playing with colors, shadows and effects. This time around I had to cope with a pre-determined color palette (orange and blue predominantly) to preserve the visual identity of Firefox, and that’s often the case in professional design.

Step 5: Adding Raster effects

This step consists in exporting the icon to Photoshop for the finishing touches. I added some layer effects, adjusted the contrast and changed the beach ball angle and colors. I also had to manually tweak the 16px version of the icon for a sharper and more contrasted result.

Although I could have switched to raster right after step 3, I tried to delay this transition as much as possible in order to preserve scalability and “editability“. You gotta love them those vectors, they never fail you.

Step 6: Icon Packaging

The last step is about exporting the final design to Icon Composer, an application that comes bundled with Apple’s Xcode. Once the final icon is ready, I exported it to CandyBar to edit its metadata and then re-export it as an iContainer, a Mac icon (ICNS) and a Windows icon (ICO). I have previously used IconBuilder, a Photoshop plugin for making icons, but I recently noticed that the combination of the two above-mentioned apps can do exactly the same, with style.

This wraps up the design process of Furfox. While I am overall satisfied with the result, I am perpetually looking for ways to do better, faster. Kaizen spirit for the win!