In the old days, we had to draw an icon pixel per pixel. They were small and did the job very well. Now apple and microsoft seems to be fighting about who’ll accept the biggest icon! Microsoft announced 256×256 icons for the new Windows Vista OS! Apple came back with 512×512 icons for its Mac OS X Leopard! Ubuntu operating system even announced vector icons with undefined size!

The 512×512 picture below was taked from TurboMilk to show how big an icon of 512×512 will look in your screen, pretty big?

I can understand that they wanted bigger icons since the monitor and resolutions gott bigger and made the standards icons look smaller and smaller… but they are way too big!

When creating a web site, it’s a must to test it in multiple browsers as well as multiple version of those to make sure the visitors see what you want them to see. Google Analytics is the best free website analyzer to install on your website and track which browser your visitor are using. Even though I am not an Internet Explorer user, Internet Explorer is still the popular one, following closely by Firefox. So I have to test it! To do so, you can install a multiple versions of IE on your PC. The easiest way is to install Yousif’s Multi IEs installer which contains IE3 IE4.01 IE5 IE5.5 and IE6.

As an icon designer and GUI lover, I found Turbo Milk article on the common 10 mistakes of icons design very interesting. I agree with all 10 points.

#1 Insufficient differentiation between icons
#2 Too many elements in one icon
#3 Unnecessary elements
#4 Lack of unity of style within a set of icons
#5 Unnecessary perspective and shadows in small icons
#6 Overly original metaphors
#7 National or social characteristics not being taken into account
#8 Images of real interface elements in icons
#9 Text inside icons
#10 Outside the pixel framework

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Adobe has just launched its free and long-anticipated online version of Photoshop, Photoshop Express Web App. Photoshop Express is a Flash based editor with about a quarter of the options and tools of Photoshop for desktop. Anyhow, it look like a good application for anyone who wants to edit, then share their photos. The service is free and comes with 2G of album storing, import from Picasa, Facebook and others.

This month free vector is a danger sign with skull and cross bones with grunge/clean versions.