I was contacted by Acqualia – the creators of the Apple Design Award-winning application Picturesque – to design a new icon. Picturesque, an application I already use on my blog, is stunningly simple in its purpose and product; it beautifies images, but not in the typical Core Image-filter like fashion you see most of the time. The true power is the simplicity; there’s no ugly distorting filters to get in your way, but a few tools catered to your needs which provide instant satisfaction.

Read on for the inside process in this ‘Making the Icon’ post.

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It’s nice to see Apple finally updating the canon of Mac inteface design – the HIG, or Human Interface Guidelines – that you can read or download in PDF form here. I particularly liked the revamped section on icons, including a ‘Creating Icons‘ (albeit very basic, gives a good idea of the process of adding realism to icons) and the ‘Designing Toolbar Icons‘ section. A good read either way, as it’s very low on jargon and very high on interesting gotchas.

I got a nice Airport Extreme router, with gigabit ethernet, 802.11n-draft wi-fi, and a shiny USB port. Since I also keep most of my stuff on my external USB drive, I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to hook up my movies and music to the router, so I could watch movies and listen to my music wherever I went, and regardless of the computer I was on. I set up the Airport, plugged in the disk, and walked back to my laptop.

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I had a MacWorld countdown on my Mac because of this, but now it can go.

The new Mac Pro. If only the store would go back up – I am getting one of these puppies.