Various icon sets designed for Pocket Gems mobile game Epic Empire. When creating icons I always start out with a hand sketch exploring various ideas. From there, I will move on to Illustrator and create a vector base for the icon, sometimes the shape will change slightly while the sketch is getting translated into a vector image, to help legibility and to clean up the form. If the overall shape of the icon reads well, I move on rendering the icon in Illustrator, minor shading and value tweaks are sometimes made in Photoshop at the very end. Download Game.