After the showcase of a collection of 3D icon designs, this time we would like to show something quite small but extremely beautiful. Like I said some of my previous articles, icon designing now has two directions: one is for huge icon designs with a lot of details, the other is for mini icons which are able to save space and give enough information. For example, the sizes of Windows icons, initially in Windows 95 there are only 2 sizes in each icon (16px and 32px). Now Windows 7 has been released, the icon sizes are from 16px to 256px. However, for web design or desktop application design, small icons are somehow still very useful, especially for listings and toolbar buttons.

To me, mini icons are all about sharpness and maintenance of details. Also the consistency of style is important. Here we summarised a number of very nice mini icon sets for you. Most of them are free resources, but please check the author website for the appropriate licensing information before you use them.

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Double-J Design is focusing on designing stock icons and custom icons for web or desktop applications, printing projects, etc. Also at Double-J Design, you can find loads of free icon sets available for download. Besides doing designs, Double-J Design also reviews a large number icon designs and web/desktop GUI design everyday. Therefore, we write about design tutorials, design ideas and nice collection of good designs. Today we picked up about a number of sets of very nice 3D icon designs which might be useful in the stage of styling or inspiration in your design procedures. Some of them have been featured in a number of design blogs but here what we picked up are all about 3D designs. To me, a good 3D icon set design is all about the consistency of style or perspective. I have discussed some issues in some icon design forum about 3D icon design like what tools they normally use to design 3D icons, how to keep the same style within one set. I would like to hear some feedback or comment on these issues here as well. 

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It’s has been only around a few months since the last update of the WordPress theme here for Double-J Design. In my opinion, it has been not quite successful. I actually have got plenty of feedback and comments from lots of sources (e.g. comments on Double-J Design, replies on wordpress.org.cn, etc) Most of them are positive and a number of great designers pointed out some critical issues or bugs or problems in the last version of Double-J Design theme (Version  2). For example, browser compatibility problems (mainly about the support of IE6), HTML and CSS mistakes, etc. I didn’t really have time to modify a lot about the old version and I though the design wasn’t too nice as well.

These days, I spent some spare time to redesign and refine an updated version (V3) of Double-J Design WordPress theme. Today, after some initial tests, I am happy to officially change the V2 theme into this new V3 theme.

Here I would like to introduce further more about some of the changes in this version of the WordPress theme design.

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It’s been quite a long time since I was planning to redesign the theme of my website Double-J Design. And now it is ready and here it is the first release! This time I used more bright colours than the old theme which was in dark blue. As Double-J Design is focusing on design ICONS and GUIs for web or desktop applications as well as print projects, on the home page I put a target line “Looking for Icons?” in order to how the primary services of Double-J Design.

However, there are still some problems or bugs with this theme and I will try my best to improve it. For example, I found that the layout will be slightly different in Internet Explorer and Safira, the positioning of some texts are different. I also found that in Internet Explorer 8, using compatiable view will be better. I will be trying to minimise the mistake in the template files and CSS style sheet. Therefore I desperately need your comments or suggestions or solutions to those bugs or porblems which will be all greatly helpful in the improvment of my site in the future. Also after a few of days and after a few tweaks, I would like to contribute this theme to public as a WordPress theme. Thanks again for your visit to Double-J Design and hopefully everyone can find useful resources here.

Yesterday, I just received the newsletter from BCGSoft for the release of BCGControlBar Pro version 10.3. As I provide the GUI design and coding service here, therefore I would like to introduce a little bit of BCGControlBar which I used in many of my developed projects.

BCGControlBar Pro (by BCGSoft) is a very good graphic user interface (GUI) library for MFC developer. It has recently been integrated into the MFC library in Visual Studio .NET 2008. The .NET version library is also available. But to me BCGControlBar Pro is the most powerful lib for GUI development as it implement many nice UI features in typical windows applications. Most of the features are taken from Microsoft products such as Ribbon in Office 2007, Outlook like sidebar, intelligent docking.

I have been using BCGControlBar Pro for 7 years since when I was in the second year as a undergraduate student. I got a BCGControlBar Pro version 6.3 from my tutor and was required to do some development of a medical software. Actually, only a few nice features were used in that application. Below I would like to introduce some nice features of BCGControlBar Pro and their applications in developments.

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