So, I had some downtime this week at work, and put the time to good use (off the clock of course!) by making some more Apple products in vector form with my good friend, Adobe Illustrator! This week, my victims are the newest iMac, Mac Mini, Magic Mouse, and iSight (an oldie but goody).

iMac 27 Inch (Revision 10) This was a pretty straightforward object to recreate. Nothing fancy beyond gradients.

Mac Mini. This would look a lot better if I had bothered to find a metal texture to apply in place of just the grey gradient.

Magic Mouse. This was much more simple than I had originally anticipated!

iSight FireWire Camera. May I just say that the perforations were a pain?

Brigham Young University, in conjunction with Omniture, is sponsoring an iPhone development competition open to their students. I was involved with the same competition last year when Myself and two others produced the game BattleDot, which won third place.

The competition is won by a team producing a brand new app, getting it into the app store by the deadline, and having the most unique users per day in 3 weeks. This is not an easy task. It is very difficult to get noticed in the app store, and is therefore difficult to get many unique users without some serious marketing and attention.

At any rate, our application this year is very different from our previous year’s attempt. We have created a simple gaming system that relies on networking. Basically, the user needs to make friends in the app in order to play 2-player games. These friends are tracked, and as more friendships are made, more games may be unlocked. As part of a social experiment, the user’s friends are tracked and plotted on a map as well as their friend’s friends, and their friend’s friend’s friends out to six degrees.

You can find out more at it’s official website, and you can download it directly from the App Store!

Another thing I like to do when I have nothing to do is to recreate recognizable icons. I like to see how closely I can approximate the original look, and often I can find new ways of using the tools available to me in Illustrator.

The Finder icon. This was simple really. Just something fun to do.

The QuickTime 7 icon. I made this one to practice using blend modes on gradients more effectively.

The new QuickTime X logo gave me an opportunity to use radial gradients, and customize their shape and placement.

The iChat icon let me try doing some more gradient blending modes, like the QuickTime 7 icon.