Well, with a new Apple product having been announced, it seemed time for me to recreate it in vector form as I seem to like to do. This was the result:

The clean lines of Apple’s design make the vector illustration even more convincing. I especially liked making the small details such as the front-facing camera. Well, I hope you enjoy it!

Brigham Young University, in conjunction with Omniture, is sponsoring an iPhone development competition open to their students. I was involved with the same competition last year when Myself and two others produced the game BattleDot, which won third place.

The competition is won by a team producing a brand new app, getting it into the app store by the deadline, and having the most unique users per day in 3 weeks. This is not an easy task. It is very difficult to get noticed in the app store, and is therefore difficult to get many unique users without some serious marketing and attention.

At any rate, our application this year is very different from our previous year’s attempt. We have created a simple gaming system that relies on networking. Basically, the user needs to make friends in the app in order to play 2-player games. These friends are tracked, and as more friendships are made, more games may be unlocked. As part of a social experiment, the user’s friends are tracked and plotted on a map as well as their friend’s friends, and their friend’s friend’s friends out to six degrees.

You can find out more at it’s official website, and you can download it directly from the App Store!

Another thing I like to do when I have nothing to do is to recreate recognizable icons. I like to see how closely I can approximate the original look, and often I can find new ways of using the tools available to me in Illustrator.

The Finder icon. This was simple really. Just something fun to do.

The QuickTime 7 icon. I made this one to practice using blend modes on gradients more effectively.

The new QuickTime X logo gave me an opportunity to use radial gradients, and customize their shape and placement.

The iChat icon let me try doing some more gradient blending modes, like the QuickTime 7 icon.

I came across this CSS example the other day. It’s quite simple in principle, but it is quite impressive to have thought of and implemented it. Román, who created it, uses multiple divs to create the illusion of an image wrapping around a can by compressing the images on the edges of the can. It is then overlaid with a transparent PNG which produces the highlight and shading. Check it out here.

Welcome to coastalvectors.com. This blog is a place for me to talk or post information I learn about graphic design, CSS, Apple products, and more. I hope that some of the things I learn and share can be useful to those who visit. Please enjoy what I have to offer.