At Mono we have this little side project where we are building an app to help people get proper HTML content out of their Keynote presentations.

I wrote about the idea before in an earlier blog post. Said blog post describes a really clunky workflow to get a Keynote presentation to eventually become a website like this. We are building an app to make it easy enough for anyone to do.

Anyway, the app needs an icon, and I needed an excuse to learn more about using the iPad Pro as a graphic design tool.

After some trial and error with various apps I settled on using Graphic by Autodesk to try and create a first version of the icon. I based myself of off an existing sketch made on paper.

In the process I had to learn a lot about Graphic as a tool itself. Overall I thought it was interesting because it felt much more natural to manipulate vector points with a pen. Whereas with a mouse you are always struggling a bit to put something in the right position, with a pen it just feels more natural.

The end result is not really up to my standards to be a proper Mac app icon, and I’ll probably discard this. But I can sense some potential here… especially if there’s good handoff between a Mac app and an iPad app, the iPad app could be used for tweaking the details whereas the Mac app could be used to paint the broad strokes.