Glass icons are essential feature of the modern website design making it look professional and clean, and contributing to its promotion. Being the sign of the mac-like design glass web icons get popularity among other brands too. Web icons with glass effect can be created easily but you need to keep in mind that love for the glass style should not be turned into the glass fever.
Web icons bring clean look to your website making its design amazing and much more professional. Though this effect should be reasonably used since it can be harmful for the design perception.
Glass icons are incredibly well-liked and attractive elements of web-site or blog decor. This glass icon style is so effective thing that can easily impart the perfect, clear and professional look to your web site, presentation or desktop and embody a kind of the "Web 2.0" spirit.
Pluses and minuses of the glass icons usage.
Do the elaborate and intricate look of the web icons designed in the glass style turn your brain and you believe that it is a hard task to do this? You shouldn't be puzzled - it is obvious that the process of their creation is rather simple. Glass web icons can normally be designed within a couple of minutes with Photoshop, Illustrator or Corel software program, so it's not a big problem even for the newbies in the design sphere. So you do not need to have extra web page design knowledges. Everything you need is some helpful tutorial, some skills of working with these pieces of software and the images you are going to turn into glass web icons.
The glass effect is considered to have been borrowed from the Apples OSX operating-system style and copied by Windows. Obviously you may argue that glass icons are so firmly associated with Apple product that the glass-styled elements make people think of the entirely different brand which makes the usage if this type of web icons meaningless, but you can't deny the fact that the glass icons style has numerous benefits .
Probably the most important feature of the present day web site is social bookmarking web icons. If you'd like to have a great advantage for the web site promotion use eye-catching glossy icons for this purpose. Eye-catching social bookmarks raise the possibility of the visitors clicking on them and the amount of the clicks increases correspondingly. So due to this fact you are able to promote your content more effectively.
Web icon with glass effect as one of the types of the glossy-styled icon.
Glass icons can be viewed as an independent icon style though it is logical to assume that glass style is just one of the types of the shiny, glossy design.
The following - other types of the glossy web icons design can be marked out:
Glossy icons can be aqua, crystal, plastic etc. and at the same time transparent and half-transparent.
Also, there are partly glass and partly stained icons meaning the objects contain some glassy or stained elements.
Glass web icons as well as other kinds of icons are usually depicted with reflecting. It is one of the standard features of the "Web 2.0" icons. You may find various tutorials on the internet instructing to create vertical reflection effect for web icons. It is the effect when icons are like images placed on a shiny, reflecting surface or tower above the water surface.
The crisp and pure look of glass icons makes navigating through the website pages interesting and playful. In the Internet sources you may find numerous tutorials about the ways of creating such neat web icons.
Methods for quick and easy creation of glass web icons.
Adobe Photoshop is the number one software for creating web icons. Photoshop is becoming steadily more and more flexible software for design. Nowadays it allows to create almost all visual effects used for the graphic design. A huge amount of the great web icons designs were made up of a help of this software. The ability to combine pixel painting with vector tool for creating glass icons, buttons, characters etc. is a vital feature of the latest Photoshop versions.
The easiest way to design glass icons is to make the "glass" layer overlap the image, not the whole image but the most of it. By using the "eraser" tool it will be possible to build an empty diagonal line through the image. You are supposed to proceed using eraser for making adjustments to the glass layer until the moment when the glass effect repeats the contour of the icon. It should kind of the glass haze in the opposite sides. After this procedure complete the further adjustments should be applied.
Professional web designers should use this effect carefully and take into account that glass-fever may look ridiculous. Keep in mind glass icons should be combined with taste so that the website style could remain professional and reserved.
Author Resource:
Stan Lem is not a newby in writing for the web - he started about five years ago and took special involvement in the area of web design and web development - more specifically web icons and glass web icons .