I Made App Icons ULTRA Realistic

App

icons

used to be a beautiful thing with

realistic

textures and fantastic lighting, they were basically works of art, but now they are a bit boring. In this video, I'm creating

realistic

versions of these popular app

icons

to bring back a little To try Glory Days, we're first tackling Spotify, which happens to be the most popular music streaming app on the planet, from the biggest pop stars to the greatest hits of The Wiggles. Basically now they have everything, obviously your logo should look like this. sound waves, but what it reminds me of most are those old metal microphones with slots all over them and one thing I loved about old app icon designs is that they weren't afraid of being a little old.

I mean, Instagram was essentially a Polaroid camera that hadn't been popular since the '80s, so I think the new Spotify app icon should be an old radio because I really can't think of anything that better represents the ability to select a tune from a bunch of different sources and play it. I'm going with a wooden body because it looks elegant and I personally love it when the icons feel like real 3D objects and not just flat sheets, they just give this edge a soft edge light so it feels nice and smooth, but the app, well, It's pretty small, darker areas like this that can blend in if your phone has a dark background, but adding a little bounce by sliding along this bottom edge really helps it stand out no matter the color of background.

Now I want this to be a high quality speaker so I'm going to go with a leather border around it

made

from a few different images that I sewed and since the lighting will come down from the top left we'll get a nice border light around all of these edges and a little tip for you if you do it so that the light doesn't affect the darker areas of the cracks you will get a much more realistic leather sheen and then those adjacent edges will get the opposite treatment by being covered in shadow. Now I have this Nifty knit material. that looks like the speaker grill fabric and you've probably noticed that I've kept the textures of everything quite large, which is exactly what basically all the icons do: if you make the textures a realistic size, they just disappear when They are actually placed in a small size. phone screen I want to make sure that this edge looks raised, as if the fabric is stretched over it and stuck to it and that the entire speaker casts a subtle shadow on the wooden base below.

Now, a ton of old radios and amplifiers actually had his brand on them. logo stuck on the speaker fabric, so I want to do the same here by making a thick metal ring to house the Spotify logo. I'll let some bright highlights in on the surface making sure some of them are dark too, now honestly. I don't really like that each of these lines has a different thickness, so I

made

a new shape where everything is uniform, which should better match the vintage microphone look I was going for now. I want the cut metal plate to be slightly rounded. kind of like a squashed sphere and to make it look like metal, I'm going to mix this soft shading with some kind of Chaotic Blurry Reflections and then a layer of Clean Sharp Reflections that warps around the cutout where the metal would distort. finally a ring shadow and some bounce lighting here at the bottom and some additional highlights here there we'll take it home although like everything else has a texture I'll give it a nice brushed metal look with a little bit of patina.

Let's put one of those nice long shadows cast on the speaker below, which to be fair isn't very realistic, but it has a nice stylized look that I really like, it fades in a little bit and we should be fine, but now, if we want . For a working radio we will need a frequency tuner, which will need a rustic paper background on which we can print some numbers so it knows what station it is on, of course we will need one of those little plastic needles to help show us which way. we're tuned and I'm going to make it so that all of this is embedded in the wood, a little bit of shadow around everything and most of the time these things would be housed behind a piece of thin, curved glass. to protect it but now that needle is not going to move unless we have a knob to control it but between you and me I prefer knobs to have a bit of class you know something with character that is not perfectly flat and of course it is always useful if they have some cut ridges for added grip, which are actually very easy to do if you just paint one side of the lines darker and leave the others a little lighter, finally, some anisotropic glitter on the top of the knob, which It's just a special kind of light reflection that things like CDs and the bottom of pans have, and it's especially common when things have a circular brush texture like this.

I wanted to get at least a little touch of green here, since it's Spotify's main brand. color so I thought a little LED light would do the trick and with that the old simple Spotify app icon has been transformed into a realistic vintage radio where you can listen to all your favorite songs and ads now if you've watched my videos for a while now time you've probably noticed that I often use lots of fun little animations for extra flashes or moving backgrounds to keep the attention of your hooked goldfish and sometimes even a nice panning shot of nature as I know that none of you touch the grass. well, basically I get all that good stuff from the sponsor of today's video story blocks.

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To add them to the deck and remove old clips to keep the shots high quality and fresh, they even have post-effects plugins in Premiere Pro that allow you to search the entire stock library within the apps you can access blocks of stories. com Brandon Sheeper or click the link below to get access to unlimited stock media for one flat price thanks again to Story Blocks for sponsoring this video. Now let's assume the Discord icon if you didn't know. Discord basically only allows you to create your own chat rooms and many people use them to stream video games while voice chatting with their friends, hence the Discord logo being a literal game controller with that target market in mind.

I'm going to lean into the gaming theme by turning this icon into a mini arcade machine, many of which had these little hoods on top to protect the screen from light. Of course, down here is the console area where the machine's controls will go and now that the rough shape is practically finished, we can start adding textures like this scratched plastic around the screen area, complemented by a bit of roughness extreme at the top because I'm going for a very used look, this will really start to take shape as I get some shading naturally, it will be lighter next. to the screen and darker here towards the edges and let's not forget that this hood will cast a shadow as if there was light coming from above, speaking of which, these corners are some of the favorite places for light to gather, which often will give you this really sharp glossy look.

I will place a light border around the edge of this plastic along with a darker strip to make it look like there is a gap between these two panels. Now this bad boy is old, so we don't have a 4K OLED display on this thing. We have an old pixelated jalopy that shines a lot in the center, but not so much at the edges. The screen will house the Discord logo. Everything will be low resolution, but at least you'll have a nice illuminating glow around you. with a purple hue over the background to match the Discord brand colors in the real world, this thing would surely reflect the dozen other arcade machines directly around it, but I want a larger, almost cartoonish reflection animated, here in the center just as a style.

Pick the hood from the top, it will cast a big dark shadow on the screen below, and while normally these lit parts wouldn't be affected by the shadow, I think it will help this top feel more 3D, like it really stands out. On the screen, a light layer of dust and scratches will really show some wear, but it's the console area that gets the most physical handling by far, hence the extra large amount of wear. Now I really want to give this a look like we're in a dark room and the screen is very bright, so I'm going to darken this area where the light from the screen can't reach, but the area reached by the light will have a nice purple tone and , with a stroke of luck I found the perfect vintage joystick for this gaming unit, of course we will need some buttons on the other side for additional controls, one of which I will make blue for contrast and the whole thing just needs a touch of lighting to integrate into the inner part of the The machine is plastic, but this outer casing will be made of high quality metal because we are not skimping on the budget around here.

I found this super cool vent that I'm going to put up here because I'm guessing that these older machines could use a little help dissipating all the heat that builds up, so something like this should work pretty well and I noticed that Discord loves using these little illustrated characters all over their website and app, so I grabbed one of them. I think it would be a fun touch to put it here, you know, like how sometimes kids would go and put stickers on these types of old arcade machines, although they will be in the process of coming off due to their age and I have one more for this side.

I honestly really like the extra details and the little pop of color that these stickers add to the whole thing. Lastly, our screen deserves a little extra brightness and we've gone from a simple off-brand controller to a full-fledged mini arcade machine that's sure to appeal to all your friends, assuming you have any in the first place. Now we move on to Door Dash, the app you use when you need an eight-fold bacon burger and a 4-gallon milkshake delivered to your door at 3:00 in the morning, when I think about how to represent Door Dash as an icon, the main thing What comes to mind is that it doesn't matter where your food is delivered from, it's all delivered in a bag, so I'm thinking this icon just needs to be a bag, maybe it's even open and we can see some kind of food inside.

Now I'm going with a paper bag, since that's what most bags are made of these days, which is why you probably know that most paper bags are simply separate pieces of paper glued together, so I'll glue one of those seams here on the back with the flap slightly separating from the piece behind and then a large center flap can go forward held by Now, the sides of the bag, most restaurants don't iron their bags before they ship them, so what this needs is a good amount of wrinkles along these edges, which I can amplify visually with a little bit of shadow between the layers of paper and then I can use this edge. as a guide and I find where the paper peaks and if I put a little bit of shading in that place and fade it out, add a little highlight on top, that's going to give me some pretty nice wrinkles and I was pretty bold with some of these because I want to make sure that they stand out when the icon is very small, speaking of which from here you can't even tell that it's paper, so I think a much thicker texture is necessary and, frankly, it's not real paper. bag unless it has that quintessential cutout in the center and those little wavy spikes along the edge of the bag, it's important to note that we can't continue those waves along the entire back of the bag, usually because the Application icons cannot have anything transparent. parts and you just have to keep everything solid in that rounded square shape, but that's perfectly fine because I think this looks good as is.

I think I'll fold over one or two of these little flaps to get a little extra. detail andyou also can't forget that the paper itself is a little bit thick, so this whole top edge is going to have a little light on the edge now that the bag is done, let's put that logo here front and center so everyone knows. This is a door bag, but you know an empty bag is a sad bag, as it turns out some of the most commonly dumped items at the door are chicken nuggets and french fries, so I'll give this little nugget a comfortable home here next door and some chips will be placed here one by one.

I'll adjust the exposure of the food to match the lighting on the bag and of course those high edges of the bag will cast a shadow on our food and our food will cast a shadow on the bag. I'll make our nugget here look crispier. with a special touch of lighting on top and all that food will get a little extra Bloom to make it look irresistible now if you can look at this every time it pops up on your phone and resist the temptation to order at least a dozen nuggets. You are a stronger person than me.

If you want to see me create packaging designs for famous products from your favorite movies and shows, check out this video. Here we have Mr. Ping's secret ingredient. soup from Kung Fu Panda's avatar, cabbage boy from Last Air Benders and cute SpongeBob SquarePants burgers. I think you will like it very much.