Glass icons are important feature of the modern website design making it look professional and clean, and contributing to its promotion. Being the sign of the mac-like design glass web icons gain popularity 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.
Glass icons impart classy and clean look to your website making its design attractive and professional. Though this effect should be reasonably used since it can be harmful for the design perception.
Glass icons are extremely popular and attractive elements of website or blog decor. This glass icon style imparts the perfect, clear and professional look to your website, presentation or desktop and embodies a kind of the "Web 2.0" spirit.
Pluses and minuses of the glass icons usage.
In spite of the elaborate and intricate look and feel of the icons designed in the glass style, it is 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 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 been borrowed from the Apples OSX operating system style and copied by Windows (especially Windows Vista). Some may argue that glass icons are so strongly associated with Apple product that the glass-styled elements make people think of the entirely different brand which makes the usage if this type of web icons meaningless, but the advantages of the glass icons style are obvious.
Social bookmarking web icons is an important feature of the modern website. Using eye-catching glossy icons for this purpose is a great advantage for the site promotion. This fact is easily explained: attractive social bookmarks raise the probability of the visitors clicking on them and the amount of the clicks increases correspondingly. As a result you are able to promote and bookmark your content more effectively.
Web icon with glass effect as one of the types of the glossy-styled icon.
Glass icons can be considered an independent icon style though it is logical to assume that glass style is just one of the types of the shiny, glossy design.
The following other types of the glossy web icons design can be marked out:
- glass icons;
- metal icons;
- glass-metal icons;
- transparent icons.
Transparent and half-transparent glossy icons can be aqua, crystal, plastic etc.
Moreover, 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 often depicted with reflecting. It is one of the standard features of the "Web 2.0" icons. You may find various tutorials on the net teaching to create vertical reflection effect for web icons. It is the effect when icons are like images placed on a shiny, reflecting surface or tower above the water surface.
The crisp and pure look of glass icons makes navigating through the website pages attractive and playful. In the Internet sources you may find hundreds of tutorials about the ways of creating such neat web icons.
Tips for quick and easy creation of glass web icons.
Adobe Photoshop is the number one software for creating web icons. Photoshop is becoming more and more flexible and multitasking software for design. Originally it was rather an image editor and nowadays 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 most important feature of the latest Photoshop versions is the ability to combine pixel painting with vector tool for creating glass icons, buttons, characters etc.
The easiest way to design glass icons is to make the "glass" layer overlap the image, not the whole image but the most of it. By using 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 create a kind of the glass haze in the opposite sides. As soon as this procedure complete the further adjustments should be applied.
Professional wed designers should use this effect carefully and be aware that glass-fever may look ridiculous. Glass icons should be used with taste so that the website style could remain professional and reserved.
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