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An important part of having a successful app is having a well thought out interface and icon design. In order to do that it is important to see what other people have done and where to find resources to make the best icon/interface possible. In order to do so FYA is going to release a series of “design” related posts geared towards interface and icon design. These posts will break down the designs, show where to find inspiration as well as give your great resources to learn from the great icons that have already been established so you to can make your app have an amazingly effective user interface as well as a stunning icon design. These are few resources to get you started on your icon & interface design journey.

Apple Human Interface Guidelines

Aqua offers a photo-illustrative icon style—it approaches the realism of photography but uses the features of illustrations to convey a lot of information in a small space. Icons can be represented in 512 x 512 pixels to allow ample room for detail. Anti-aliasing makes curves and nonrectilinear lines possible. Alpha channels and translucency allow for complex shading and dimensionality. All of these qualities allow you to create lush, vibrant icons that capture the user’s attention.

40 Tutorials for Creating Highly Detailed Icon Designs

As icons appear in larger sizes through appearances in Mac applications and rich user interfaces the icon designs themselves are becoming more and more detailed. Check out this collection of 40 of the best icon design tutorials from across the web, each covering the process of designing a highly detailed icon graphic in Illustrator or Photoshop.

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

Designing a good interface isn’t easy. Users demand software that is well-behaved, good-looking, and easy to use. Your clients or managers demand originality and a short time to market. Your UI technology — web applications, desktop software, even mobile devices — may give you the tools you need, but little guidance on how to use them well.

Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design

The title of the book is its chief personal design premise. All of the tips, techniques, and examples presented revolve around users being able to surf merrily through a well-designed site with minimal cognitive strain. Readers will quickly come to agree with many of the book’s assumptions, such as “We don’t read pages–we scan them” and “We don’t figure out how things work–we muddle through.” Coming to grips with such hard facts sets the stage for Web design that then produces topnotch sites.

42 Amazing Photoshop and Illustrator Icon Design Tutorials
This article is a compilation of the best Icon Design Tutorials, I think everyone will be able to learn something new from these tutorials.

The title should have been 41 Amazing Photoshop and Illustrator Icon Design Tutorials and also not Forgetting the Single Gimp Icon Design Tutorial. (A little long, don’t you think).user’s attention.

30 iPhone Apps with Sexy Interfaces -

The iPhone is a wonderfully designed device, sporting sleek curves and oozing minimalism. Fortunately, the great design doesn’t need to stop there. Ever since the App Store went live, we’ve seen some incredibly attractive software released for the platform..

[Fireside Chat] Icon designers (Part 1 of 3)

This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Visit the Product Blog for more information on our products.

iPhone Apps Design Mistakes: Over-Blown Visuals

We want to take a closer look at the design of iPhone applications and showcase some good and bad examples, best practices as well as useful ideas and recommendations for your next iPhone app design. This article is a first post of a new series related to the design of iPhone applications.

10 Tips for Effective Icon Design

We Love Icons:

We Love Icons is a joint project by Guifx^® designers Dan Wiersema and Nando Albuquerque. We started We Love Icons because, well… we love icons!

Our sole purpose is to provide you with ONE place to go to find links to the BEST freeware icons on earth.

10 Mistakes in Icon Design

It is much easier to criticize somebody else’s work than to create something cool yourself. But if you apply a systematic approach to criticizing, make a numbered list and prepare illustrations, it will be regarded as a fully-fledged analysis! In my opinion, icon design is undergoing a transitional period. On the one hand, screen resolutions are increasing, hence enhancing icons. On the other hand, we still have good old pixels. Icons sized 16×16 and even smaller are still widely used. And so, here are the most commonly observed mistakes in icon design…

25+ Fresh Icon Designers & UI Ninjas

We recently needed an icon designer for a quick job and it was far more time consuming that we thought to find a good freelancer portfolio for this kind of work. So we spent a few more hours and came up with this awesome list of icon designers and UI professionals.

Icon Resource:

Let yourself be taken by the hand through the world of visual interface design, and learn how to design icons for your own application, website, or company. Here a few reasons why it’s worth checking out; Learn all and even more about icon design in full HD quality Quicktime format movies.Icon Resource provides iPhone / iPod ready videos to load into iTunes and watch on the road.

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While running through the app-store you can become bombarded with all kinds of imagery. I picked 8 (there are tons not everyone can be featured in this post, I am sorry) that I thought were creative and interesting.

Tipulator

Take the guesswork out of restaurant tipping. Enter the bill amount, select a percentage, and Tipulator will calculate the tip. And it’ll split the check among friends.Use Tipulator with your iPhone or iPod touch the next time you go out to dinner. Your dining partners will be curiously fascinated with your cute new tip calculator.

Site | iTunes

Flickit

Keep your Flickr photostream up to date while you’re on the go! Upload and tag batches of photos using Flickit’s super-fast uploading engine and streamlined interface.

• Add photos from your iPhone library or take new shots directly with the camera
• Batch upload multiple photos
• Edit standard Flickr metadata such as title, description, and privacy settings
• Assign Tags and create new tags
• Assign Sets
• Tag photos with geolocation coordinates

Site | iTunes

Things

Things is a beautifully focused and amazingly intuitive task manager. Other task managers either oversimplify or are too difficult to use. Either way you are not getting stuff done. Things instead has the right balance between ease of use and powerful features. You can even sync wirelessly with the desktop version of Things using Wi-Fi.

Site | iTunes

WeightBot

Whether you are trying to lose (or gain) a few pounds, tracking your weight has never been more fun. Set your goal weight, record your weight at any interval (one weight per day max), view your BMI, and see your progress on a beautiful graph. Weightbot also has a built-in secure password feature to protect your weight from prying eyes. It’s easy to use, surprisingly addicting, and designed for everyone to enjoy. Even if you are not actively dieting, you will love tracking your weight just to use Weightbot.

Site | iTunes

MouthOff

MouthOff will have your mates in fits of laughter – pull it out over dinner with friends or in a business meeting to lighten the mood, use it to deliver an important message or tell someone you love them – the possibilities are endless!

Site | iTunes

Twinkle

Discover, connect, and send messages to people nearby. Upload photos and update your Twitter account. Contact old friends and make new ones, all with Twinkle, the location-aware network for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
NEW: Twinkle 1.4 is now out, featuring a landscape map feed, a built-in minibrowser, blocking and lots of other cool new tricks.

Site | iTunes

LEDit

LEDit is a led screen ticker emulator for the iPhone and iPod Touch. LEDit is great to say something to your friends when they can’t hear you, such as at the disco, in class, in business meetings, etc. All you have to do is type your message and hit the ‘display message’ button and LEDit will scroll your message on the screen.

Site | iTunes

FontShuffle

Wouldn’t it be great if a whole font cat­a­logue would fit into your shirt pocket? If you could find a type­face with­out know­ing its name, just by com­par­ing its shapes? If it were pos­si­ble to e-mail the mar­ket­ing depart­ment your desired type­face for a client pre­sen­ta­tion while still at the airport?

Site | iTunes