Free multi-touch gesture icons
Well if you've been following me on twitter then you might know that I'm currently working on the interface design for a pending iPad app named Plucked (a project in partnership with developer James Pearson). It's a fun little twitter based app which aggregates your links, does a little magic, and delivers you a flexible and dynamic reading experience.
I've been working towards getting our first version live for beta testing and at this point we are dealing purely with functionality and structure. After the initial planning session we came away with a wealth of notes and began wireframing. This is the first time I think I've genuinely enjoyed wireframing. Typically I'll do it, but I'm desperate to get started on the visual design and often abandon it mid way through (only once the full spec has been established obviously).
All the elements have been created with a basic level of design but the main focus has been making sure that it's in a decent working state to start collecting feedback from key users. This has freed me up somewhat to start experimenting with the graphics and best of all our main character design for the app branding.
One of my tasks within the initial design phase is to create a tutorial page on how to use the app. The app itself is very straight forward and we've not experienced any issues with people's ability to interact with it. Having said that, there's clearly no reason why a tutorial shouldn't exist. We have adopted the very basic concept of a training page for our first release. The app itself is very uncomplicated and therefore the basic instructions you require are quite brief.
The training page design left me with a need for gesture icons. Whilst there are a few nice sets out there I wanted to make custom ones for the app. So to make a start I worked out how many icons I required for the training page and then went about creating a template hand to work from. The hand design is illustrated to match the app's main graphic (for continuity) and is flexible (in that individual fingers can be turned on and off easily to create whichever gesture is required). Me being me got instantly carried away and thought that if I'm creating gesture icon I might as well go all out and create a full set (you never know, right?). There are a few within this set will only be applicable to maybe one or two apps out there but there's a lot of crazy developers coming up with some really fun stuff (see Uzu for example, lost a good few hours to this app, try it with music).
So anyway, once I'd finished up the gesture icon set I realised that this wasn't just going to be valuable to me and therefore I want to officially release these for download. Each file is 300x350px at 150dpi. You will also see that there's a second solid colour set too, again totally free! You can use them anywhere you like, there's no specific licence, there's no cost and all I ask is that if you can credit me then please do (but you don't have to). These icons are free for personal and commercial use but please do not redistribute them as your own. You are free to edit them as you see fit but again these must be significant changes in order to claim them as your own. Enjoy!
Gesture Icons Set 1.zip (446kb)
Gesture Icon Set 2.zip (729kb)
