Free Circular RSS Icons - What do you think? :)

I've just made a new icon package consisting of RSS icons - except they're circular! I think it helps them stand out (and also, the actual RSS Symbol goes well with a circular background). What do you think of them?

Here's the link to the package:
http://mintyferret.com/free/free-rss-icons/



If you download the package, please let me know if everything looks good/if all the files work correctly. Also let me know if you use it on your website/blog as well! I'd love to see it.

I will be posting up a tutorial on how to make these icons probably tomorrow or the day after, and I'll let you guys know. However if you downloaded the Photoshop file you probably have a good idea of how they were made. Let me know what you think, if you have any questions, or if you have suggestions for future packages!

ps: Just on a side-note, I'm also selling Advicon spaces on my blog - $2.00 for the month of March for DP members. If you're interested take a look at the thread here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=6716812#post6716812

 

I have a couple of issues with em:

GIF? Really? You are aware that although there is a limited palette of 256 colours in a GIF file, you can index that palette to match 256 colours from within your image. But it doesn't look like you've done that, because I can see very plainly with my eyes all of the artefacting happening in the gradients. It's like you did it in MS paint with the airbrush tool and thought I wouldn't notice.

Also, I wonder about your choice of colours for the backgrounds. Orange is considered universal, blue is understood, but that pink and the sandy peachy colour don't provide enough contrast for viewers with poor eyesight to even make out the internal RSS logo anyway.

There are plenty of free icons that deal with RSS and some are even truly scalabe in an ope (and web-readable format) like SVG.

I'd highly recommend some of these:



Hope this helps you improve your stuff. I'd recommend creating your stuff as an SVG, you'd enjoy using Inkscape as opposed to illustrator because it supports creating alpha gradients (photoshop does this, illustrator doesn't) as well as saving transparent PNG's for web.

get it here: inkscape.org

also check out Everaldo's Crystal Project icon set and oxygen-icons.net

both of those icon sets are full, pro quality and PNG, oxygen has vector sources available as well which work in inkscape but not illustrator cause it's just a toy of a vector program.

Best of luck, innovati!

 

Thanks for the comments innovati - perhaps though you should've downloaded the package before calling me out on things?

The icons in the package are all PNG, with the PSD files being provided. I know about the artifacting issues surrounding gifs, but I used that for my blog since it saves on kbs. Also, some older web browsers go a little wonky with PNG images, so I wanted to make sure everyone could see them on the web properly. All the RSS icons together like that have a lot of different colours and gradients, so it looks pretty bad with the other popular web format - jpg, so I opted to use gif. It's really just a preview image anyway, like I said before the PNG files are within the download.

I use Illustrator for my vector work, but since my site focuses on Photoshop stuff I wanted to show how they can be made to be scalable in Photoshop as well. Perhaps if I branch out into Illustrator I can also provide true vector (EPS is my choice) icons, but in the meantime I think this is fine.

Colour choice is just there for people's tastes - obviously on my website I'm using orange because I think you're right, it is a universal colour symbolizing RSS, however some others may want to try something different. My site aims to teach as well, so providing an easily editable background layer and showing how to change the colour if necessary helps my visitors become more familiar with what they can and cannot do with Photoshop. How they use that knowledge on their websites is up to them.

Thanks for your feedback!

 

illustrator doesn't have alpha gradients....making the higlights will be tons of fun in a toy program like illy. Trust me, I have both and use both daily. Illy is better with text, inkscape is better with graphics and the pen tool and filling stuff. no comparison.

Get both tools, use them both when they're advantageous. I mean, you've already got the expensive one, it's going to cost you nothing to add inkscape to your toolbox. Why not?

 

Illustrator CS3 can do alpha gradients.

I'll still take a look into Inkscape though! Thanks for the suggestion.

 

How does illy CS3 do alpha gradients then.

 

Really now, it just takes a bit of googling.

http://www.creativetechs.com/iq/transparent_gradients_in_illustrator_cscs2.html
http://www.bittbox.com/illustrator/opacity-mask-basics-illustrator/

I guess it was available in CS and CS2 as well, I only knew about it in CS3.
I realize though it's a bit of a hassle to create the mask, but it can be done. I took a quick look at Inkscape, but it seems analogous to comparing GiMP to Photoshop.

 

Layer masks are *NOT* the same thing as an alpha gradient. That gives the same visual as an alpha gradient effect but it is not. Example: in photoshop I can create a gradient that goes from 100% white, to 50% transparent blue. It calculates the colour as RGBA, Illustrator does not. End of sentence. Inkscape does, end of sentence.

Inkscape also does gradients on live strokes, has a MUCH better built in bitmap tracer (it uses potrace)

Inkscape has an XML editor built in so you can manually tweak your code as you work on it. Illustrator does not.

Inkscape saves to SVG's and supports more SVG filters in a standard way than Illustrator does. Adobe uses Opera to thumbnail vector images in Adobe Bridge, and Opera supports better SVG rendering than Illustrator does, look no further than the Oxygen Icon set for that.

Inkscape supports Transparency in bitmaps on the canvas. Try bringing an image with transparency into Illustrator....I'll quote to you what will happen right from Illustrator's help dialog:

Inkscape has a smarter pen tool, better boolean operations and because it's open source and designed to be modified, things like the icons can be easily customized or swapped out by changing or modifying one file.

Illustrator does have better typesetting tools than Inkscape, Illustrator does have a few advantages over it.

I know a group of profesisonal designers that use Inkscape exclusively for their finished work. Some longtime illustrator users feel more comfortable laying down the paths in illustrator, but after that they do the final colouring, blurring and exporting from Inkscape because it's more powerful, faster and easier to use. Cross platform, free and write to standard formats better than Illustrator.

I am not dissing Illustrator, but it's not as strong a vector program as Photoshop is a bitmap editor.

What I recommend to everybody is this: get CS3, and also get the open source tools. there's no reason why you shouldn't get them (especially since they cost you nothing) and use either where they are advantageous.

It's be stupid to ignore quality software because the software you own does *some* things better, get them both and then you'll always have the best tool for the job, an at a grand total of 0$ why wouldn't you?

(as for the photoshop/gimp thing, the GIMP wasn't meant to be what photshop is, but it does support and mind-numbing list of bitmap formats photshop doesn't, for import and export, and for things like Threshold and simple functions, I've foind that GIMP does those better, so I always Posterize and Threshold in the GIMP, retouch my photos in Photoshop)