iPhone Icons and Evaluation

Evaluation

I have researched and analysed many different varieties of file formats, icons and the history of apple and its iPhone. First of all I started to research the depths of symbols and icons, of how it originated and how it has been developed over the years. This took me from looking at cave paintings from before the ice age, to Hieroglyphics from the Egyptian Era of Mummification.
Then I designed a small mood board on Word Document about the five different subject we have to analyse, Horror, Fantasy, War, Sci-Fi and Humour. along with the mood board I also wrote down a brief description of what they are.
Once this was accomplished, we took a trip to the BAF08 at Bradford Media Museum, we looked at all the different styles of work and had several discussions with top game developer and designers. Then I created a PowerPoint document and wrote down what I thought about the exhibition and what I thought about each individual developer, we also made a group montage about BAF08.
After researching Symbols and icons I moved onto looking at different file formats including .psd, .jpeg, and .gif. this research gave me an in depth look at what different formats can do to a file and what difference in file size can occur if saved differently.
Once this was completed I created another slide to start researching the history of apple, when its first Mac computer was developed and when did it become the multi million corporations. During this time looking into Apple, I had a look at what their current icons on the iPhone are and tried to see if I could edit any of their ideas and use them as my own.

Once that was complete I had a look into a specification of the Five topics we had to research, Horror, War, Fantasy, Humour and Sci-Fi. I put down a brief description of these on a word document and put in several images of each to show a representation.
Once this was finished I was given an A3 Illustration pad to draw down ideas for icons to use as pieces of work. I illustrated and annotated my ideas and once I found out which of them I preferred more than the others, I illustrated them on Flash media Player. Once I finished drawing them on flash I coloured them in using the Paint Bucket tool and shaded them in using the Paint Brush tool.

All of the icons I created met up to the standards of what I was expecting, they all look like what my original ideas were meant to look like and what they were originally meant to do in their animation, although I have only animated one of the icons due to lack of time in development. The only thing I wish I had improved on would be the illustrations of my ideas stage, I believe this stage lacks a lot of my creative ability but due to a miss hearing of what the work should include and when the deadline was, I have had to deal with a short amount of time to finish up the work set for me.

Horror – for horror I decided to go for an obvious image, and decided to illustrate a typical zombie. The colours are slightly dark but still contain a bit of cartoony characteristics. There is a slight few cuts and bruises on the undead zombie, this illustrates that it has either decomposed or its limbs have been torn off. I quite like the horror icon because I believe that it is well designed and nicely coloured/shaded. If I have had time to animate this icon I would have had it walking or limping, keeping it simple but obvious.
Sci-Fi – a robot dancing in a woman’s pair of knickers, simple yet effective, I gave the robot a plain silver/grey colour so that the pink knickers would stand out much more than usual. I am not entirely sure why I gave the robot crab claws instead of hands; I guess it gives it more colour rather than the simple pink and grey. If I have had animated this icon, I would have had the robot do a little dance form left to right.
War – an obvious one to do, I have illustrated an army man with a random gun. This was a simple idea but with all the different shades of green it made it much more complex to colour and shade. I quite dislike the final result because I found the image to be too obvious to represent War. If I have had time to animate this icon I would have made it fire its gun with the man being forced back from the power of the bullets.
Fantasy – I have designed a recreation of a computer games character. The character is Link from the Legend of Zelda games and the reason I choose Link is because of three reasons, reason one being that he is an Elf, reason two is because he owns a Fairy, and reason three is that he is well known for being the star of a Fantasy game. If I have had any time to animate this icon, I would have had the fairy fly around Link with his eyes following it.
Humour – for humour I chose bright and contrasted colours like sky blue and yellow, these make the image stand out a lot more due to other images being darker in tone. The reason I chose to use bright colours is because of the colour clowns wear, they are usually bright red with many other bright colours. The reason I chose to have humour represented by a yellow Pikmin being assaulted by a ball of blue tack is because it is random, and due to research, random is quite funny if used in the right sense.