Day 2: Iconic

Figuring out a good challenge for myself today prooved to be  challenge. At first I thought I'd go with the suggestion of making snapshots of web pages in photoshop, but upon doing the research I found that project slightly more ambitious than I'm ready  for. I certainly want to work up to 8 hours of work to create a finished base page. So Instead I decided that a good first challenge would be to attempt to create icons for a webpage that would act as links to well known sites, but I could only use colors and shapes to convey the destination website.

I was able to get through only two icons in one day (hopefully this will improve) but my knowledge of vector editing has increased and I've been able to start thinking in vector instead of raster, which is going to help a lot when I need to make good looking graphics. So below are the two icons I was able to kick out. I feel like I did a fairly good job of getting across what website they represented, though the second one posed more of a challenge since it's primary icon is an "f". I got around that part of the challenge by reducing the letter to it's basic shapes and paring it down until it formed a shape that was only vaguely recognizable as a letter.

So there's day two. Plenty of stuff learned! Also I really recommend playing with the Aviary.com tools, esp if you  are a broke artist and can't afford the full Adobe suite of tools.