Artwork

#1

Slightly off topic perhaps, but I’ve noticed some really lovely artwork for these music apps, and my question is: where do you get it. More to the point - as a one man band doing development in my free time, how do I get hold of cool artwork without mortgaging the house?

And a note to Jules - I studied maths and comp sci in the 70’s and worked as a programmer/designer for the first half of the 80’s until gravitating into jobs that require you to wear a suit. I’ve come back to programming in the last few years for a project that I’ve wanted to do for ages and came across Juce after realising that I needed to go multiplatform. I studied object orientation earlier, but Juce has taught me what object orientation is really about and is an exemplar, in my view, of elegant design. Well done and my undying gratitude. (And btw it’s really nice to see code using British spelling!)

#2

Thanks for the compliments!

(And I’d also be interested to hear about people’s artwork stories…)

#3

No responses on this one, so I'll try again: anyone any tips on where you get that really nice artwok for music apps?

#4

Our designer works in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.  You can find some graphics on http://findicons.com or other paid stock art sites.  But if you want a unified, consistent look across a UI, I don't think there are any shortcuts;  you either need to know those Adobe products well or find someone who does.

#5

I'd recommend learning Inkscape before Photoshop.

If you're designing icons, there's nothing productive about frigging around with pixels when you can do the same with vectors and rasterize at the very end.

#6

Or better still: don't rasterise at all. Put it into your app as SVG or some other vector format.

#7

MS paint. Nailed it.

#8

I know you dislike everything pixelated, but until we all have 300dpi displays, pixel snapping makes a big difference in clarity. I did some tests with SVGs and the results are too fuzzy.

#9

The SVGs that Illustrator generates are also huge and I remember not being able to get them to work with Juce's SVG code, although I didn't spend a great deal of time trying, because the files were huge anyway.  Does Inkscape do a better job generating SVGs?  I've had a couple of people recommend that program to me recently...

#10

If you do not have time or do not want to learn how to make good graphics, you can find some guys that are doing nice things for free (or at a very cheap price) on KVR forum.

Check out this thread for instance:

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=315231&highlight=design

 

 

#11

Thanks for the answers guys. BTW it's not that I don't have the time, it's just that I don't have the skills. All of my drawings look like failed pancakes.

#12

Inspired by some of the answers here, I also found the site http://www.dribble.com 

search on "ui kit audio"

#13

That site, http://dribbble.com,  is great.  Thanks for sharing...