So, in the first part of this trilogy of posts I briefly described my initial ideas for CaseDetective for FogBugz’s application icon, thus revealing how incompetent I am as a graphics designer! My quest then begun for a professional designer and ended with Jordan Langille at buyicons.com.
After Jordan and I had exchanged a few emails and Jordan had some idea of what CaseDetective for FogBugz was supposed to be all about, Jordan agreed to come back a few days later with an initial sketch of his idea for the application icon for me to review. This is what I received a few days later:
My verdict? I love it! I think this icon shows Jordan’s experience, the concept is simple and distinctive with bold elements that I believe will scale well.
The trilby is very iconic (pun intended), it is instantly identifiable with Private Detectives of days gone by, my favourite being Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. And if you don’t think of Private Detectives, then you probably think of Police Detectives of a similar time.
The hat is sitting on a couple of paper stuffed folders, the “cases” to be investigated. Again, I think this works well, most people would instantly associate those folders with being the cases that the detective is working on, and for various reasons (to be revealed at a later date) those folders have quite a significance to CaseDetective too.
Jordan and I have since chatted about the colouring of the hat and folders, and I also mentioned that I’d like the hat to be a more diagonal (just pointing to the left a little) as I feel it’s a little straight on in his sketch. I haven’t however dictated the colours, I’m leaving that to the professional designer, I’ve got full confidence in his eye for design and colour coordination, if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have commissioned him in the first place!
So, while Jordan is off creating the final CaseDetective for FogBugz icon, what do you all think, does it say “CaseDetective” to you as much as it does me?
