Antonio Bello posted on August 08, 2007 02:23
Recently, I've been looking for an easy way to create icons and some web graphic. I don't consider myself a graphic designer, but I like to experiment with creating some cool graphic, often with not satisfactory results.
The state of the art tool every good designer uses is, of course, Photoshop. But in order to take advantage of its huge power it requires constant usage, knowledge of the hundreds of functions it has - and from my point of view its learning curve is not trivial. I think I know and I am able to use no more than 10% of its power...
A few weeks ago I found a product which suits my needs: creating icons, either 2D and 3D, creating 3D models, render images and much more. The name of this product is RealWorld Icon Editor.
It consists of 4 distinct, but integrated, tools:
- a 3D object modeler
- a renderer, to render 3D models to icons and images
- a "classic" 2D icon editor, which allows creation of graphic using standard 2D tools and pixel-level bitmap editing
- a batch processor, which automates the process of converting icons to images, images to icons, resizing, and more
The product comes with several tutorials, it has a great and user friendly user interface, and it is sold at a very low price.
Among the several features it has, I want to mention the following features:
- quickly compose icons from parts
- apply filter and graphic effects to icons (it is also compatible with some photoshop filters)
- create 3D template models, with custom properties, to be imported when designing more complex icons
For more informantion, look at the RealWorld Icon Editor website
