Friday, June 5, 2009

Evolution of the sketchbox icon

Sketchbox from omz:software is a nice freeware tool for the Mac. It can be used for sketching on stickies which can be collected in a main window.


I worked closely together with Ole Zorn from omz:software and reworked the Application icon.


The prior sketchbox icon was a nice idea i really liked and i want to leave the idea of the icon and don´t want to change the whole grafics. So i decided just to give it a mor emodern and more MAc os X like touch.

So i based the new icon on the old one (which is done by Ole Zorn himself)

For the final version of the icon it was very important to have it vectorized to have it in higher resolutions since leopard can have icons up to 512 x 512 px.

And it was very important that the icon is not to detailed for having it scaling down. So it should work in high and low resolution.



I rebuilt the whole icon using Adobe Illustrator. I gave it some transperency effects to have lhave it fit better with Mac OS X




Ole Zorn wanted to have the little snake on the front sticky in the new icon. So i rebuilt it to and redesigned it to have a smother look.

After that i just thought that it doesn´t look very promising so i came up with the idea of having 4 colores of stickies in the box.


After that i added light effects and reflections and added the front sticky



This is the final version of the icon:) Hope you all like it;)




I also decided to rework most of the application icons to have a more modern look of the interface.

After that i had a much clearer looking interface. I reworked all the blackish icons to match muchb etter with the sticky color.

And finally i redesigned the tool cursor icons for giving them a better 3D look. Check out the new pencil icon which has the color you choose:)


BTW: You can now donate to Ole Zorn for using sketchbox. So if you like it and use it a lot…


If you like the look of the icon and need one for your application, please contact me through the contact page:)


cheers dietmar


Flux with templates designed by me!


Yesterday the escapers ( a small software firm in the U.K) released aa new version of Flux, a new web publishing app for the Mac, including a new template "Man on the moon" designed from Dietmar Kerschner

I am very thrilled about that and hope you all like it.

As i worked with Flux i must say that this Application has much potential for a new area of web publishing apps. I just hope like many others that it´s gonna be finihsed soon.


The new template "man on the moon" is based on a pencil drawing. After expermimenting on paper i digitalized it and colorized it with my Mac.

All colorization is done with Adobe Photoshop. After that effects were placed.


The cool thing about it is, that the man on the moon ropes up and he is always next to the link the user is visiting:)


This is the final result:





Besides new templates i designed for Flux the escapers squeezed in some inrerface improvements in the new Flux version also designed by me.


We are working closely togetehr to get the best user experience for you flux users. So stay tuned… One day it will happen and it will be final;)


cheers dietmar