I’m very excited that the new Spotify redesign is finally live and public today! I’ve been living with this new UI for a few months now, as I’ve been working with Spotify to create a new iconset to accompany this design. Its been a fantastic project to work on, and need to some spare time to write a more detailed blog post about the process. In the meantime, this article on Wired UK will do nicely, and I was particularly to chuffed to read this tweet this morning…

Still drooling over the new Spotify UI. Those icons.

— Chris Braniff (@chrisbraniff) April 2, 2014

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It was my great pleasure to speak at Smashing Conference Oxford this week, in the guise of ‘The Mystery Speaker’. If you follow me on Twitter, this will explain my behaviour that week:

Currently in Albania. Definitely not at #smashingconf

— Jon Hicks (@Hicksdesign) March 18, 2014

My talk was ‘The Icon Design Process’, a tour through creating your own iconsets, from starting brief to choosing the right deployment method – iconfonts or SVGs. So much has changed the last few months in regards to deployment methods, and I fully expect the techniques to go out of date in another few months time! Such is the way of the web.

I will be writing a longer, more comprehensive blog post soon, going into the various options for using SVG, and providing fallbacks as there are many useful methods. While I couldn’t go through all of them in my talk, I highlighted the one that I prefer at the moment, Grumpicon. Until then, please download the slides which includes notes and links!

Tagged: icons, oxford, talks

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When the Icon Handbook was first released, back in 2012, it coincided with some rather more important life priorities and as such I didn’t market it as well as I might. In particular, the website was left half-finished, lacking a mobile view, SVG icons and a icon size reference chart that was rapidly going out of date. I’ve since not found the motivation to go back to it…until now. Smashing Conference in Oxford this week (more on that next) gave me a kick

I still have more plans for the site, but at least for now I’m not so embarrassed about the stylesheets, or outdated information. ALL the icon reference charts have been updated to reflect the missing new changes (Android xxhdpi and xxxhdpi, iOS7, Blackberry 10, Windows 8), and charts for Symbian, Meego and Ubuntu have been removed. Ubuntu will be back as soon as they send me the new info! I’ve also updated the Favicons page to add new sizes like Windows 8 Pinned Tiles, and remove things like Opera Speed Dial images that are no longer applicable.

If you haven’t bought a copy yet it’s on sale until the end of March, so now is a good time!

Tagged: iconhandbook, icons

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I recently chatted with Jamillah Knowles of the BBC Radio 5Live show Outriders about icons, and the episode ‘Symbols and Signs’, is now available on the BBC Podcasts and Downloads page, or download directly as an mp3.

The episode looks at how Unicode works, emoticons and the power symbol, while I talk about the difference between Logos and Icons, and the challenges of icon metaphors with localisation.

Tagged: bbc, icons, interview, radio

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I loved bike shops as a kid (especially the smell of them!) but we didn’t, and still don’t, have anything quite like this. 718 Cyclery is not only a great retail space, but the whole attitude to building bikes and access to the process is unique and just plain brilliant. I found myself nodding in agreement to everything Joe says.

As for the bike they build in video – gorgeous!

Via twinfish on twitter.

Tagged: bikeshops, cycling, videos

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When I was writing The Icon Handbook, I had my list of first choices for people I wanted to work with. Chris Mills and Owen Gregory for Project Manager and Copy Editor, Gedeon Maheux from the Iconfactory for Technical Editor, and for the foreword… The Noun Project. All of which said yes! I absolutely love what The Noun Project are doing, there isn’t a comparable site for the quality of it’s curated collection of pictograms.

So when I was asked to write a guest post for The Noun Project blog, I was chuffed to bits! The post I’ve written, ‘Insights on Symbol Design’ contains portions from The Icon Handbook (and as such It’s another taster for the book), but was still written more or less from scratch, looking at considerations of pictogram design in particular.

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Last Autumn I borrowed a friend’s Turbo Trainer, an odd looking device that allows you to use your bike indoors for training. With the nights getting longer and the weather getting worse, it seemed like a good way of retaining the fitness gains and weight loss from the summer.

My first experience wasn’t that great, rather uninspiring in fact. The bike is locked into a rigid position, there was a fair bit of noise (even though this was one of the quietest ones) and it felt nothing like cycling on a road. For my second session, to a proper structure and keep up the interest, I played a Sufferfest video, which helped a lot. Here’s the trailer for the one I bought, ‘The Downward Spiral‘…

If you’re watching this trailer sitting on a sofa, rather than a turbo trainer and bike, you might chuckle at the music and captions feeling a bit overdramatic. Believe me, it doesn’t once you’re on the bike and you get the instruction to ‘close the gap!’ you go for it. 25 mins later however, there was the strong smell of burning rubber, and lo, I had melted the rear tyre, and the floor was littered with rubber shavings. I’d love to claim this was because I was doing such an intense workout, but I think I’d just set it up with the wrong resistance.

The way around this is to use a special turbo trainer tyre, made of a much harder compound, and the easiest way to do that is to have a separate wheel setup ready and change it over for a turbo session. That means getting another tyre, wheel and cassette! But that’s not all you need, as the you also have to prop the front wheel up, have a fan on to keep cool and protect your bike from the corrosive sweat that drips off you in bucket loads.

It’s an awful lot of faff!

However, it wasn’t until the next ride that I felt the benefit. Just doing two short sessions during the week made the Friday ride much better. In the end though, I decided that getting a turbo trainer was the equivalent of a sandwich toaster – a dust-gatherer after the first couple of uses.

Now we’re in February, and the UK is having an extended cold snap where my usual routes have layers of compacted frozen snow. After falling off my bike last November, which made my ribs sore for weeks afterwards, I don’t fancy the risk, and I’ve finally caved in and got one. It’s always going to be better to riding outside, but for the times I can’t, I can at least do a hamster in a wheel impression.

Tagged: cycling

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I’m getting a lot of ‘Are you still using Fireworks?’ questions recently, and my answer is ‘Not for almost 2 years now…’. I’ve been using Illustrator CS5 solidly ever since, but part of the transition is going from Fireworks Pages/States to Illustrators multiple artboards. Artboards are more flexible, and allow you to have see everything at once, but the built-in options for exporting artboards are limited.

I use this wonderful script, which provides all the settings I could desire, from format to filenaming. Top work!

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There are a few apps that I’m particularly enjoying using at the moment, so I thought I’d share in case any of them are news to you:

Choosy

Choosy does a seemingly simple task, and does it very well. For a start, it provides a central preference pane to choose your default browser, but its main thrust is letting you choose which browser to open a link in. You can do this either manually via a chooser display (right), or automatically depending on order of preference.

My favourite feature is ‘behaviour rules’. For example, I get emails from Opera’s internal bug tracking system, and I always want to open these in Opera, no matter what my default browser is at the time. I can now do that with one simple rule set up in Choosy!

For someone like me who still uses several browsers (mainly, but not exclusively, Safari, Chrome and Opera) it doesn’t ‘arf make life easier.

Fantastical

Quite simply, the best calendar app I’ve ever used. Its always handy (sits in the menubar), doesn’t have the vulgar leather stitched interface of iCal (yes I know about Busycal) but is small, neat, and made for humans. Yes, it still has an element of skeumorphism, but in my view its done right – just enough to make it feel warm with the distracting superflous details. As well as the mix of traditional calendar and agenda views, it allows events to be added using human language, with the calendar view filtering live as you type, and adding people and locations. Its a joy to use, and I use it as my one and only desktop calendar app.

And then, two well known apps that I continue to enjoy…

Evernote

This is still my central collection source. I’ve tried all sorts of ways over the years, but the Evernote ecosystem of desktop-web-mobile is still the winner for me. Shared notebooks works brilliantly, and they are constantly evolving the UI (such as the recent subtle Notes redesign). It all goes in here – images, PDFs, notes, draft blog posts, anything I want to remember or keep for later. Its my travel diary, design scrapbook, UI library, recipe and notes book. It was invaluable in writing The Icon Handbook:

There’s still a few niggles with Evernote – for example you can now drag a thumbnail out of the app to export it, but it does so in a format that only Evernote can read. Not really export is it? Despite a few niggles like this, I remain a big fan.

Spotify

I’ve had a on-off relationship with Spotify. In general, I treat it as a way of previewing whole albums before deciding whether to buy them, creating collaborative playlists and getting access to a large music library on my iPhone without any syncing woes.

They’ve done a few wonky things recently (such as requiring Facebook to sign up, sharing everything with Facebook by default) and since joining iTunes match (a service that I’m greatly impressed with) the latter reason is less important. However I’m enjoying a great new Spotify feature: Apps. I love the last.fm and Guardian reviews apps particularly, making it an even better place to discover new music.

Tagged: apps, osx

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Earlier this week I recorded an interview with Chris Bowler for his Creatiplicity podcast. Chris has a very genial style and the whole affair felt very relaxed and enjoyable! Its not just about The Icon Handbook either, we discussed everything from parenting to cheese.

Pop along for a listen!

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