Icon/Logo Design

I wanted to create a design for my game community project Crystal Docks. After thinking about it for a while, the realisation came to me that creating a good design is hard. Really hard. There’s so many factors to consider. So to make it easier I decided to leverage the Material Design specifications. Adhering to a design spec removes options, and this makes things easier. It provides a framework you need to build from and abide by instead of having unlimited options to work with.

Up first was to put down rough concept designs and ideas while keeping the whole Material concept in mind. Just rough ideas, nothing fleshed out. Doing this gets ideas out of the brain and puts the design into a form you can work with. This is what I ended up with after playing with MS Paint:

Secondly, throw together some more polished designs. Open up a more substantial program like GIMP and flesh out some of the designs you like. Never mind the tiny details, those come later. I liked the crystal shape and it worked well with the Material shadow, so I built upon that. Here are two designs I ended up with:

Finally, after many discussions and ideas being thrown back and forth, I ended up with one design in two flavours. Now to add in all the little details the Material Design spec includes.

Creating something that looks good is hard and can take a while. I’m not a designer by any stretch, but I like the end result that was achieved. Bonus points because it wasn’t bought and I got to learn some things along the way.