Icon-A-Day, Icon # 50, iPod Mini

A quick side step for the fun of it.

Sunday, February 20, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: Icons

Icon 50 (iPod Mini)

Yesterday I said I would be doing another File Type icon, however I have decided to take a little detour out of the default icon pack icons and do something purely for the fun of it.

About a month ago, I finally cracked under the pressure and bought an iPod. I went in to by a 512 iPod Shuffle, but somehow walked out with a 4G iPod Mini. This has, however, worked out quite well for me and I have become a big iPod Fan, mostly for its Audible.com support. The long and short of this story is that my iPod is almost always attached to my computer these days, and when it is it shows up as a removable drive. Since I am me, when a new Drive shows up on my computer I have to make an icon for it.

I was holding my mini the other day, and thought, it would be pretty easy to make an icon for this. As it turns out I was right. The only problem is that the final image ended up looking a bit too realistic, and I could have probably just used one of the many bitmap images from the Apple site and saved myself a bunch of time. However this dose make a nice tutorial on what you can easily do with techniques we have already established. So off we go...
 
Step 1:

Now if you have ever seen an iPod you will know they are pretty simple. our entire Icon can be made with just a few shapes.
 Step 2:

The most difficult part of or image with be the main back of the pod. This I will do with the Mesh Tool. You can see here how I rounded the corners a bit. And placed some nodes where my shadows and highlights will be.

Step 3:

Now I simply change of the Mesh node colors. We do a light grey for the center 4 nodes, a dark grey on the left, and a light grey on the right.

 
Step 4:

You can see here our how our mesh created the illusion of dimension.
Now using the techniques from the Transparency 201 Class, I give the iPod a bit of texture.  Very subtle.

 Step 5:

For our touch wheel we simply use a series of 6 circles with gradient fills.


Step 4:

To finish of the touch pad I put the controls on using the Text Tool and some simple shapes.

Step 4:

Now for our display I use 3 boxes, 2 for the outside of it to give it a slight lip and fill them with gradients.
The main part of the display is a Mesh Rectangle, with some darkened and lighted areas to make the display seem set back.

 Step 8:

It might not really need it, but for consistency with the rest of our pack I go ahead and give the display a bit of gloss.

 Step 9:

Lastly I draw a little Apple logo and place it in the display behind the gloss. I also use our Shadow and Reflection techniques to give us our Icon-A-Day style reflections and shadow.

Finished Icon Image


Click here to download the finished icon.

Well, that was fun, tomorrow we will start back into our supported icon pack icons.

Read the other Icon-A-Day Articles: (Icon-A-Day Index)

Check out the CorelDRAW for Skinner Index, for links to all the related Video Tutorials.

And don't forget to check for all the Icon-A-Day icons as they get made, in the Miscellaneous Icons Gallery at Wincustomize.com
All Images and Text in this tutorial are © Paul Boyer, and may not be reused without written permission.

14 Reply 19 Referrals
Corky_O
Reply #1 Sunday, February 20, 2005 3:53 PM
Great opportunity to use the techniques we are learning.

Thanks, Teach.

PixelPirate
Reply #2 Sunday, February 20, 2005 4:08 PM
It looks photorealistic. I oughtta look into CorelDraw and see how it differs from AI.

BlueDev
Reply #3 Sunday, February 20, 2005 4:17 PM
That raelly is amazing Paul. Excellent work.

Gusteau
Reply #4 Sunday, February 20, 2005 4:29 PM
One word... STUNNING! Great work as usual. Thanks for this one mormegil!

thethimble
Reply #5 Sunday, February 20, 2005 5:00 PM
I can almost touch it. Good Job!

Narscan
Reply #6 Sunday, February 20, 2005 5:18 PM
Hey this is Cool, I like it.
Thanks mormegil

47songs
Reply #7 Sunday, February 20, 2005 5:36 PM
Paul, you drew the apple logo? Even that seems difficult for me.

i81b4u-uc
Reply #8 Sunday, February 20, 2005 6:29 PM
Dang, if I didn't know any better I would swear it was the real thing. You did a fantastic job with this one.

horiz0n
Reply #9 Sunday, February 20, 2005 11:19 PM
Now thats a bit different, looks great.

horiz0n
Reply #10 Sunday, February 20, 2005 11:24 PM
whoops

APB
Reply #11 Monday, February 21, 2005 6:43 AM
Looks so real!!!

sssnake
Reply #12 Monday, February 21, 2005 4:03 PM
What good ideas you have! It looks like I could make something like that (of course not that good like your skin) but it is also important to have a nice idea. What else to say but .

PurrBall
Reply #13 Tuesday, May 31, 2005 5:23 PM
I just won a silver one just like that. )

I've gotta use this!!!

But how?? That computer doesnt have IP, and I dont plan to put any SD proggies on there.

5tr4ng3r
Reply #14 Friday, April 20, 2007 5:39 AM
Go regedit and look for this key:

hkey_local_machine\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\explorer

Now create a new key DriveIcons

Under that key, create a new key of your drive alphabet (eg. "C" for C drive)
Under the C key, create a new key named "DefaultIcon".
Value data in this key will be the location of your icon (eg. C:\Icons\icon a day\Icon-A-Day (Hard Drive).ico)

Refresh your My Computer and there you go

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