Sunday, February 08, 2009

My Love Of Icons

Note: All artwork and icons depicted in this article are Copyright © KennettNet Software Limited. Do not reproduce without written permission.

When writing a programming project, there are three major things that signify that your project is nearly finished, and has transformed from a project into a product. They are:

Putting the project into an issue tracker

This signifies that the project is no longer an unfinished collection of code, but a useable program with issues that need to be fixed. Putting a project into issue tracking too early will just create thousands of worthless tickets as you work through your specifications.

Releasing a build to someone outside your office/computer

Again, it signifies that your project is becoming a useable product when you can show it to other people and be fairly proud of your application, despite the fact it isn’t finished yet.

Getting Artwork

This is probably less important to most than me, but getting final artwork done - such as toolbar and application icons - is a big step, and converts your program from some code with placeholder icons into something unique and yours. This step only happens with projects you’re really committed to since it costs time and money to get done right.

This is my favourite step in product (vs. software) development by far. Successfully implementing “wow” features comes a close second, but going through the process of developing artwork for an application is something I really enjoy and get really passionate about. Now, in a large corporation or even a company large enough to have staff a hierarchy, I imagine X budget gets assigned to icons and artwork and it gets done. On the other hand, I get very excited when the time comes to get some icons done, and normally end up sending an email to our icon designer before the specs of what I want are fully formed in my head. I honestly believe that if I had the budget, I’d get professional icons done for every idea that pops into my head, from our released software to the internal tools we use for support.

To me, the quality of the icon on a program really represents the product as a whole and how much the developer cares about the quality of their product. I love reading articles like this, and I’m glad lots of other people feel the way I do. Over time I’ve come to care about application artwork more and more, from “something pretty cool” for my early apps to something that’s absolutely essential to get right, no matter how much heartache it takes.