Web Glass Icons

Glass web icons can be viewed as an independent icon style though it is logical to assume that glass style is just one of the types of the shiny, glossy design.

Other types of the glossy web icons design that can be marked out:

• glass icons;
• metal icons;
• glass-metal icons;
• transparent icons.

Glossy icons can be aqua, crystal, plastic etc. and at the same time transparent and half-transparent.

Furthermore, there are partly glass and partly stained icons meaning the objects contain some glassy or stained elements.

Glass icons are usually depicted with reflecting. It is one of the standard features of the "Web 2.0" icons. Creation of vertical reflection effect for web icons is really simple furthermore you can find a great amount of tutorials on the web instructing how to do this.

It is the effect when icons are like images placed on a shiny, reflecting surface or tower above the water surface.

The clean look of glass icons makes navigating through the website pages playful and attracts many people. In the Internet sources you can definitely find many tutorials about the ways of creating such neat web icons.

Creation of glass web icons.

Adobe Photoshop is the number 1 software for creating web icons. Photoshop is becoming steadily more and more flexible software for design. Originally it was rather an image editor and nowadays it enables to produce almost all visual effects used for the graphic design. Plenty of the great web icons designs were made up of a help of this software. The main feature of the latest Photoshop versions is the ability to combine pixel painting with vector tool for creating glass icons, buttons, characters etc.<\p>

The simplest way to design Glass icons is to make the "glass" layer overlap the image, not the whole image but the most of it. By using the "eraser" tool you'll be able to build an empty diagonal line through the image. You are supposed to proceed using eraser for making adjustments to the glass layer until the moment when the glass effect repeats the contour of the icon. As a result it should create a kind of the glass haze in the opposite sides. As soon as this procedure complete the further adjustments should be applied.

Professional web designers should use this effect carefully and take into account that glass-fever may look ridiculous. Glass icons should be used with taste so that the website style could remain professional and reserved.