Starting the Game - iPhone Game Blueprints - page 30

to show more than one object. This is why such wonderful pieces of pixel art become
dismissed and turn into decorations of portfolios. However, it would still be great to
use such an icon for your game if conditions were appropriate. The following are two
examples of such graphics:
iOS 7 brings some new aesthetics into application icon design—graphics became
flat, there is more interest in simple and smooth shapes and clean colors rather than
in photo-realistic illustrations, rich textures, and so on. Most artworks look like vec-
tor graphics with solid fill or delicate gradients—the main color accent is made on a
bright background; central element of compositions are emphasized by the so-called
diagonal shadows ; they are pretty long, tilted by 45 degrees, and have no blur ef-
fect (or its volume is minimum). Such elements can be generated in Adobe Illustrator
by using Blend Tool. You only need to create a primary shape of the shadow, then
it should be cloned and its copies are shifted right and down by diagonal trajectory.
The opacity level of the copy must be defined as zero; after that, it can be connected
with the primary shape by Blend Tool; the number of interpolations can be adjusted
via the tool's menu. Another important approach is color; a palette used in iOS 7 is a
bit different from the previous era, it is clean and usually has ambivalent visual char-
acteristics; for instance, shades can lie between red and orange, or green and blue.
You should try to avoid including any large portions of text in the icon, particularly
the name of the game itself or it will be a sign of bad taste. The application name in-
side the icon looks silly, because there is an actual name below the icon at the home
screen displayed by the system, and together they form a visual tautology. There
is another reason too: the long text will be unreadable, being scaled down, notably
on pre-Retina devices (don't forget that icons for the first iPhone had a width of 60
pixels).
The only exceptions to the text inside the icon are short service words (up to 4 to
6 letters in length) helping to differentiate one version of the same application from
another. I'm talking about such designations such as:
• HD : This is the high-resolution edition for Retina iPad.
• Free/Lite : This is the gratis version of the application.