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In this detailed Photoshop Tutorial, you’ll learn how to create an amazing speed counter icon and also some nice tricks and tips you can apply on your daily basis when dealing with icon design in Photoshop.

Due to the length of this tutorial, we’ve split this post into 2 parts. You are still welcome to download the free PSD in part 2.

Materials Needed:

• Carbon Pattern

Step 1: Setting Up Our Document – Creating our Canvas

Create a new Photoshop document (CTRL/OPT+N) and set the different values for the input fields to the ones displayed in the image. I’m going to create the icon at 512x512px but you can apply the same concepts I’m going to show here to almost any resolution/size, you just had to keep proportions and to scale styles correctly.

Now you can just press OK or wait a bit and read the next Step.

Step 2: Setting Up Our Document – Creating and Saving Custom Presets

This step is kinda optional but its concept can be applied to everybody’s needs depending on what kind of designs you’re planning to create over and over as for example in this case, an icon designer that is constantly working on creating Leopard ready Icons.

Once you set up a document with certain values you can save them by clicking the Save Preset button then choosing a name for your new preset and selecting which values you want to preserve for future new documents.

In this case I’m saving all values used to create this file as a base for future projects that will involve 512px icon creation. So, the next time we want to start a project of this kind, all we need to do instead of writing the different values inside the input fields, is just to select the new custom saved preset and we’re good to go.

Step 3: Setting Up Our Document – The Proper Alignment

Now we’re going to take profit of the Photoshop’s GUIDE TOOL to align our icon and to be able to work from the center. This way we ensure to create shapes with proper proportions.

To do that we go to View/New Guide… and we insert 50% for the horizontal orientation and then repeat the process and select again 50% for the vertical orientation.

Step 4: Creating the Icon – Basic Shapes

Ok, so now we’re ready to start working on our icon. First thing we need to do is to set our Foreground color to #ebebeb, select the ELIPSE TOOL and make sure we have shape layers and not just paths or fill pixels as the behaviour of the tool.

It is important we set the settings mentioned above and displayed on the right before we start drawing our shape because the shape tool acts in a different way when these settings differ from the ones showed.

Now we can center our pointer in the intersection of our guides and with our SHIFT and ALT keys pressed, start dragging our shape from the center to the upper left corner of the canvas. When the shape is complete, rename this layer to “main_shape”.

Step 5: Creating the Icon – Styling our main_shape

To achieve the desired effect and with our “main_shape” selected go to Layer’s Blending Options and set the values as showed below for Bevel and Emboss, Gradient Overlay and Stroke.

Step 6: Creating the Icon – Adding more Shapes

Let’s add some depth to the base of our icon by duplicating our current “main_shape” layer, renaming it to “main_shape_02″ and changing its Blending Options from the current ones to the ones displayed as follows:

Once you have applied the new layer style press CTRL/OPT+T to scale down your “main_shape_02″ down around a 95%. Insert the values in the following fields from the TRANSFORM TOOL.

Step 7: Creating the Icon – Adding our Dark Metter Area

Now we’re ready to start working on the black area that will contain our meter indicator. Duplicate your previous “main_shape02″ and change its shape color from the current #ebebeb to #111111. Rename this new layer to “base_black” and scale it down as explained in the previous step but this time around a 98%.

Access to the Layer’s Blending Options and change the following values:

Now we finally add the carbon fiber pattern made by env1ro and we leave its scale at the default 100%.

Don’t worry if you don’t see any difference with all this blending effects applied, that will change once we start adding light details and other elements to the icon.

Step 8: Creating the Icon – Adding some lighting to our Dark Area

At his point let’s make our icon a little more interesting by adding some lighting effects into our Dark Area. Let’s duplicate this “base_black” layer, rename it to “base_black_lighting” and set its fill to 0%.

We can now clear its layer style by right clicking the layer from the Layers Palette and choosing “Clear layer Style”. Now we can add a brand new Gradient Overlay effect to the layer.

We press D to go back to our default colors ( White for the foreground and Black for the background respectively )then press the “Add Layer Mask” button located at the bottom of the Layers Palette to add a new mask. Make sure our new layer mask is selected.

- you will notice that because it appears focused with a white square if you compare it with the other minuatures located at the sides and, because the name of your document changes from standard layer to whatever layer is selected+layer mask at the top of your document window boundries - .

Now we pick the GRADIENT TOOL, choose the following settings and start drawing our gradient as shown in the next image. Use the bottom of your document and the intersection of your guides at the center as a reference to your gradient start and ending points.

Your icon shoudl like something similar to this:

Step 9: Creating the Icon – Adding more detail to our Carbon Pattern

I really like to keep all my icons as much editable as possible using just vector shapes and layer styles. However sometimes it is impossible to keep this way or working if you want to achieve certin effects that are very difficult to do with standard Photoshop vector tools. So to give more detail to the carbon patter added in step 7 we are going to work with rasterized content in order to achive the effect we want to see.

First thing we need to do is to duplicate our “base_black” layer and place it just on top from the original “base_black” so this copy will rest below our “base_black_lighting” layer.

Now, for our new “base_black_copy”, we uncheck all its styles from the Layer Styles except for the pattern overlay. We can do that by double cliking the layer and accesing its Layer’s Style Window or like as show here on the left by expanding its attached styles from the Layers Palette and clicking on the little eye icon at the left of every style we have applied in our layer.

Then we set its fill to 0%. Now we create a new layer just in top of our “base_black_copy” and we select and merge both ( CRTL/OPT + E ), the brand new blank layer and our “base_black_copy” and rename the merged layer result to “pattern_refined”.

Now for this new “pattern_refined” layer we set its fill to 0% again since it has been changed to 100% when merged. Now, we’re ready to get rid of some parts of our layer. First zoom in at around 1200% with the ZOOM TOOL ( Z KEY ) and select the MAGIC WAND TOOL ( W KEY ). Now apply the following settings to the tool and click on any black pixel as showed below.

Once we have our desired selection we press BACKSPACE to clear the selected pixels from the layer and we apply the following setting s to the Layer Styles of our “pattern_refined” layer. You will notice that since it is the result from a merge operation there’s no pattern overlay effect applied anymore.

Now your icon should look similar to this:

Do you see the strange pixelation that occurs specially at the top and bottom of the icon?. You can compare the smooth edges from the previous layer to this new “patter_refined” layer by hidding and showing this last one from the Layers Palette. This happen because the effects from the blending mode we previously applied are going out of bounds from the actual shape so we should fix this if we want our icon to be visualy consistent.

Since the pixelation only occurs at very edges of the layer, we can use a Layer Mask to hide those imperfections. To do that we are going to look for the “base_black” layer into our Layers Palette. Now we CTRL/OPT + CLICK on the little thumb showing the rounded contour of the “base_black” layer to make a selection of the shape. Now we go to Select/Modify/Contract and we set value for the contract selection to 2px. Now we go to the bottom of our layers palette and as show in the previous step we with our “patter_refined” layer selected, we add a new Layer Mask but this time, since there’s already an active selection, the new Layer Mask will only show the content inside our selection hidding those ugly pixelated borders.

Now your image should look like this:

Step 10: Creating the Icon – Adding some more lighting

Now it is a good time to add a little more lighting to our icon. We have spend a lot of time and did some efforts making our pattern to look really crisp and now we can take profit of that by adding some light that will emphatize that.

Let’s create a new layer just in top of everything and rename it to “light_ambient”.

First of all, and with our new layer selected, is to set our Foreground Color to white and to pick a really big soft brush (B KEY) by setting its master diameter to around 700px and its hardness to 0%. Now we’re going to place the middle of our brush (the contour you can see when you switch to the brush tool) approximately at the top edge of our canvas and click once. Like so:

Like in the previous step, we’re going to use our “base_black” layer as a reference for the selection, so once again we CTRL/OPT +CLICK on that layer and then we switch to the SELECTION TOOL (M KEY). Once we have selected the tool we hit the DOWN ARROW KEY from our keyboard around 10 times (or move the selection down around 10px) and then we do SHIFT+CTRL/OPT+I to inverse the selection and we hit BACKSPACE.

At this point your image should look like this

Nice. Now we CTRL/OPT+CLICK on our “base_black” again to change the selection to the original contour of the black shape and inverse the selection by doing again SHIFT+CTRL/OPT+I to get rid of the pixels outside the base shape we draw with the brush and may remain from the previous delete operation. We set the blending mode for this layer from Normal to Screen and set its opacity at around 25%.

We now can hit CTRL/OPT+D to deselect our current selection if it’s active yet.

As an additinal touch, we’re going to create a new Layer Mask (as explained in previous steps) by hitting the little icon located at the botton of the Layers palette and with our brush tool (we keep the 700px diameter) and #808080 selected for our Foreground Color we’re going to make single clicks all around the sides and bottom part of our layer mask from left to right as the opposite direction of the clock wheels. So, we start at 21:00, then 18:00 then 15:00. As explained in a previous image, we’ll use the boundries of our canvas to position the middle of the brush.

Now your image should look similar to this one below:

Step 11: Creating the Meter – Using Actions and Vector Tools

Many people don’t think too much about actions when using Photoshop. However they’re a very powerful help when you have to deal with tedious and repetitive tasks and it can save us a lot of time and effort.

We’re going to apply that concept in the cretion of our icon. As you can see from the finished image there are a series of little bars evently spaced all across the upper and at the sides of the inner part of the icon that serve us as a meter where the arrow moves in between as an indicator of whatever you want to indicate. It would be very tedious to create those little bars one by one and even more tedious to reposition them perfectly to create the visual sensation of continuity between marks. So, to do that and keep it as simple as possible, we’re going to create our own action that will make the work for us.

First we should hide all our existing layer in order to keep our vision clear. Now we’re going to select the LINE TOOL from the vector shapes menu and holding the SHIFT KEY we’re going to draw a line from the very top of our canvas to the very bottom just to keep shapes in proportion and nice. It is very handy to keep your guides visible. Set the options for the LINE TOOL as shown below. Color doesn’t really matter at this point, we will be able to change it easily since we’re creating vector shapes. For now I will use just #000000.

Now it would be a good idea to reposition our line just at the center of the image just to make sure all is perefectly aligned. To do that we’re going to take benefit from the TRANSFORM TOOL and, to be more specific, from its reference point feature. We first press CTRL/OPT+T to acces the tool, then we place the reference point for the object at its center (if it isn’t already there) and then, we set 256px (512px/2) for both, horizontal and vertical positions. This way we make sure that our object is at the exact middle of our canvas and we can perform the follwoing tasks without any visual imperfection.

Now we go to Window/Actions (or press ALT/F9) to make our Action Panel visible and we click on the little icon menu located at the top right corner of the panel and choose New Action. We can give a name to our action. Now we press Record.

At this point we’re going to select our DIRECT SELECTION TOOL (the white arrow) and we are going to make a selection including all the shape from our new line. Then we go CTRL/OPT+C to copy the shape, CTRL/OPT V to paste it and then CTRL/OPT+T to acces the TRANSFORM TOOL again.

Now we’re going to locate the rotation setings for the TRANSFORM TOOL and we’re going to insert a value of 9 degress of positive rotation. Now we can stop the action by clicking the Stop button located at the bottom of the Actions Panel.

Very close to the Stop button is where the Play button is located. Yet in your actions panel, make sure you have selected the very first operation of your new action (it should be the “copy” operation”). Now you can hit the Play button and see the action running. You will have to do that several times to complete the circle but it will not take much longer than a few seconds. Now imagine copying, pasting and rotating all those new lines one by one. Sure it takes several minutes to achieve to not to talk about those little mistakes everyone does when involved in repetitive tasks….

Now this would be a good time to rename this layer to “meter_shape01″. Now your image and layer should look like this. Remember we hide all layers below our “meter_shape01″.

Time to duplicate our brand new “meter_shape01″ and rename it to “meter_shape02″, then we hide this last layer and select our “meter_shape01″ again. With our Vector Mask selected (click on the thumb to make sure it is the same way we did for our Layer Mask in previous steps) we’re going to select the ELIPSE TOOL and set its behaviour to Substract From Shape Area. Now taking as a reference our guides we draw a circle from the middle holding SHIFT and ALT keys to make a perfect circle. For our “meter_shape02″ we should end with something like this:

Now we hide “meter_shape01″ and repeat the same operation for “main_shaoe02″ but this time extending our substracter elipse shape a bit more to the edge. You should end with something like this:

Ok, so let’s rotate our “main_shape02″ by pressing CTRL/OPT+T to access the TRANSFORM TOOL and, as we did for the creation of out action, we set the rotation value to 4,5 degrees for the transform operation. Now if we make visible our “meter_shape01″ we should see something like show here below:

CONTINUE TO PART 2

Related Topics: icon design tutorials, interface design techniques