How I improved 4.379% of Brizzly’s home link

Brizzly is my favorite web-based Twitter application. Regular readers of this blog may remember my redesign of the service’s favicon for Peter Wooley’s Brizzly Favicon Alerts script for Greasemonkey.

Shortly after the script’s debut, I was contacted by the folks at Thing Labs (they make Brizzly) to talk about integrating my icon into the app.

A few months later, a new Brizzly interface debuted. Hidden in plain sight among the numerous UI and feature improvements, my 16 square pixels of glory perched unassumingly at the top of the page.

This is why I love the Internet. If you release a compelling product, you’ll inspire users to contribute ideas, feedback, or even design assets. Keep your ear to the ground, and you’ll swiftly reap the rewards.

Responses

Joe Barstow says

Nicely Done! I’m inspired by your initiative. I’ll follow your example :)

Care to share what program you used to create this icon? Photoshop?

Also Great job with the notification icon. It can almost be interpreted as if the bear is blowing a bubble!

Tyler Sticka says

I typically use Photoshop to create tiny icons like this. I just grab the pencil tool, set it to a single pixel and away I go! For 16-pixel icons, I’ll even pencil in the anti-aliasing, setting the tool’s opacity to 30% or so and adding or erasing the edges until they’re sufficiently smooth. I find Photoshop’s automatic anti-aliasing to be a bit too liberal when pixels are at such a premium.

For larger icons, I use a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator. I’ve tried Fireworks a few times, but can never get into any sort of creative flow with it. I’m looking forward to improved pixel snapping in Illustrator CS5.