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Adam Whitcroft

My 🤖, 🤖, and 🤖 app icons are now available in Apollo (the beautiful Reddit app by @christianselig )

Here's a little breakdown of how I made them...

I used Blender (as I often do) to create a base model. I'll start with basic shapes, and add details once I'm happy with the overall dimensions and look. Here's the finished model and render preview. Nothing fancy, just a couple of basic materials and an HDRI.

Next, I head to Figma to start on the detail passes. First up, balancing out the colours of the render. I find this much quicker than tweaking render settings in most cases. Compare the raw render (left) to the adjusted render (right). Much better!

Using primitive shapes with a gradient fill, a blur modifier and various blend modes I find little areas of detail to add. You'd be surprised how much something this simple can add to a design. The bottom rim lighting is just a couple of inner shadows with a mask.

Once I'm happy with the lighting and effects, it's time for an adjustment layer to tweak the overall colours of the icon. I used a radial gradient of pink and blue set to Overlay. See how much more vibrant the colours are, and how the tones feel tighter? It’s like magic 🪄

To finish it up I added a jaunty angle, some background circular gradients to make the antenna pop and a subtle noise effect overlayed on the image (because it just felt right).

@adam Damn these are really good. Perfect blend of iOS color simplicity with 3D-ish character.

@adam exquisite. And I love the breakdown!

@adam Beautiful work, thanks for sharing. 🤌