Thursday, July 28, 2011

Lessons learned by programmer doing the work of a graphics artist

At my previous position we had a graphics team that handled all the icons and other art needs. Wonderful group of people and they were very open to you handing them a less than spectacular image as a base idea and then making it into something professional. They also made sure icons followed a theme. At times they threw away my idea and went another direction. No big deal to me, they are the professionals.

Jump into my current position at a different company and we had a graphics artist but he has decided to move on and they are not in a hurry to replace him. He will do some freelance work for us and the rest they will farm out. That pretty much leaves me to do all the graphics work for the iPhone and Android devices on my current project.

I know my way around various graphics programs so this is not a huge deal and it does give a nice break from coding. I don't need a ton of assets and I have just enough of an eye for visual design that everyone has been pretty happy so far with what I am churning out. I do hit the web to find as much free art as I can. I always make sure it is free for commercial use. They rest I draw myself.

What are the lessons I have learned?

1. Always find the asset in the largest format possible. Sure you will be scaling it down but scaling down beats the crap out of scaling up any day. If the download page has it already scaled in multiple sizes grab all of them as a lot of time an artist will scale from a vector image giving much better results than a simple pixel scaling.

2. Once you find the asset in the large format save it in that format and only edit copies. I have screwed this up multiple times. Maybe I worked on a copy first then deleted the original or put it in some obscure directory. At times I find something while on the Mac and copy it to the PC to edit it or do the opposite. Then I can't find the original when I want to scale it again or tweak a color. The best solution is to have an assets area in your version control system to keep the originals.

3. Be consistent. Don't have a round add button (+) and a square [-] delete button. If one is gradient the other should be gradient too. Use consistent background images and colors. Make it look like all the screens belong to an app written by a person and not like it has been written by 10 people who never met each other.

4. Don't be afraid to throw away images even if you have done a lot of work on them. They might have looked good when you first put them in but the rest of the system has surpassed them so that one asset you loved now looks like it was drawn with a crayon.

5. Get feedback and accept it. If every person you show the app too says "Dude that background is ugly" then fix it. You may love it and may have done too many hours of work on it but the feedback of the masses is generally correct. If they can't read the white text on the background image change the text color until it is readable don't question their eyesight.

6. When looking for assets download anything that you think looks cool even if you don't have a current need for it. Never know when it will come in handy and finding it again might be impossible. I have directories full of potential icons I don't need right now.

7. Learn how to use various paint programs. I use Paint.NET, PhotoShop Elements, GIMP and some other utility programs. I was transferring everything form my Mac to my PC for editing. That was getting silly especially for simple resize and clip operations. I installed GIMP on the Mac, it is free and very full featured. MS Paint really is not what you should be using especially with so many free options available. You can use GIMP on pretty much any platform for free so it is a great place to start. Each program has strengths and features others don't and they all handle the same basic file formats so learn to use more than one.

8. Layers are massive time savers so learn and use them. If you watch a real PhotoShop pro like the graphics artist at my last job they have a lot of layers going even for something as a simple icon. It allows you to tweak various aspects of the image without redoing all the work or messing up the background. For the home page of my current project I wanted icons that appeared to be sitting on shelves. I have multiple layers: background, each shelf, each icon and each piece of text under each icon. I can quickly change the text or text color without screwing up my background. I can move elements around. I can resize the shelf. If this was a flat image that would take forever. You can save as a flattened image once you are done but keep in mind lesson 2 and save the PSD (or layer format of the software you are using) first then save the flattened image as a PNG. Don't lose your layers!

9. Nine-patch is a cool format for use on the Android. Make sure you investigate it. It allows you to quickly create scalable images when working on Android devices. Android docs on nine-patch is a good place to start. I am using this format for the shelves as there are various device sizes along with landscape and portrait orientations to do layouts against. Nine-patch is perfect for this situations.

10. Don't be afraid to experiment, it is the only way to learn. You may not be a graphics god but I am sure you can get place holder art ready to at least express the action of the icon. There is plenty to grab from the web even if it is just temporary. Everyone should know how to load an image and size and scale it. I cringe when I see a web page load super slow only to find out they loaded a 1 meg image and allowed the browser to scale it to 200x200.

11. Appreciate your graphics artist if you have one available to you. Playing around in a paint program is fun from time to time but you will soon realize it takes a lot of talent to produce professional looking applications. Back in the day everything was green, white or orange text on a black background. That does not cut it any longer.

12. Don't go overboard. Everyone has seen an application that looks like someone chugged a couple of cans of paint and threw up. Every label in a dialog is bold or italic and has a unique color. Use color to indicate something like an empty required fields but don't just use colors because you can. Multiple fonts can really mess with your eyes. For the love of {deity of choice} never blink / flash anything. I will stop using software instantly when that happens. I get migraines from strobes. I can't eat at Joe's Crab Shack or go with my kids to the roller rink with the disco ball. Blink screams amateur.

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