![]() It was just oozing with style and told a really fantastic story as well. "I'd love to have more drawn out stories and adventures that I could play over the course of weeks or months." You once blogged that Sword and Sworcery was one of your favorite titles on iOS. Some of my favorite daily stops (besides random Pinterest collections lately) have been: Naimoka, Pasa La Vida, Drawn, Lovely Package, Little Big Details, and Dribbble. ![]() What are your favorite art blogs to check out every day? ![]() There are really too many to name and many more artists that I don’t even know their names. #XSCOPE PLAYER SAFARI PROFESSIONAL#Between my personal drawings and professional illustrations, I’ve always learned the most over the years from how well figures can be abstracted to their essence in drawings by any of the classical masters to modern artists like Moebius or Geoff Darrow and even watching the films of Miyazaki, Disney and Pixar. I try to learn something from every piece of art or creative work that I run across, it all ends up brewing in my subconscious until it’s needed later. What artists, digital or analog, inform your work the most? It’s extremely important to really nail the message and content of the icon if you want the best chance of someone initially checking out your app as well as keeping it on their device (or at least out of a subfolder). For most apps you run across, icons will be the first thing you see (sometimes before the name of the app) and a lot of people make snap judgements for exploring the app further based on how much they connect with that first impression. Icons are the face and branding of an app, and they set the tone and give people an idea of what to expect for an app’s purpose, quality and content. It really comes down to having a strong base knowledge of art and design fundamentals, and then technical knowledge on how and where the icons will be seen, and what the best way to build and optimize the sizes are. Some of the best icons rely on very simple and minimal elements that are put together in a recognizable way. It’s flexible enough that every icon doesn’t need to be an illustrated masterpiece though. Icon design is really starting to get into the illustration and composition arenas, there are so many sizes from giant to microscopic that the icon needs to be able to scale and maintain its message - all while looking nice. Thanks, it’s been quite a learning experience there, but it’s helped with all aspects of my drawing and technical skills. "There are so many sizes from giant to microscopic that the icon needs to be able to scale and maintain its message." What advice would you give to app developers designing an icon for the first time? You’ve created some pretty cool stuff for the Iconfactory. Initially, I was all about the crayons and tempera paints but I’ve since learned to handle a few other mediums. I loved drawing battle scenes of my dinosaurs and rockets, and it was always a great way for my imagination to play. Did you color and draw a lot growing up? What mediums were you initially attracted to?Īs a kid, I’d carry around a three-ring binder or clipboard with blank printer paper in it that my Dad would refill as needed. Your work has always struck me as whimsical. Shortly after that I started playing with it in Illustrator, and that was the beginning of my vector drawings. The computer has always been there too, and when I was about 17 my parents got me a Wacom tablet for Christmas. Like nearly everyone else, I started drawing as a kid, I think it just never fell out of habit along the way. We had some lunch and now she’s napping, so I’m digging in to get some more work done. I’ve been watching/playing with my one-year old daughter this morning in-between working on projects. You can find him on Twitter at and on Dribbble here. Lanham took a few minutes to talk The Verge about the art of crafting great icons, the best apps to get stuff done, and what makes Sword and Sworcery so damn good. His unique style, which combines juicy color palettes with imaginative shapes and creatures, has made him one of the most sought after icon creators today. David Lanham is an illustrator at The Iconfactory, where he designed many of our favorite icons for apps like Twitterific, Acorn, Fantastical, and Coda. ![]()
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