There was a whole lot of hype around the Mac community and even more viral marketing techniques for Disco. If you are not familiar with Disco, have a read. In short it is a CD burning application for Mac that is cheaper then the likes of Toast, and chock full of visual candy.

I haven’t used Disco, and I don’t really use Toast either, burning CD’s is not something I do very often (which reminds me to start doing some back ups…). Anyway what really struck out at me was the application icon. The creator of the icon, Jasper Hauser, who I linked to in design inspiration, has been kind enough to give a run down on the icon, so if your interested - check it out.

What I found interesting in this post was the use of 3D for the disco ball, and also that most of the work on the flames looks to have been done inside Photoshop. For the upcoming Vista icons using 3D is something I really want to look into so that the realism that is needed can be achieved. At the moment Illustrator is all I have been using when designing icons, including the old XP icons, which Illustrator is great for but may not be enough with what I have seen in Vista. The problem with 3D is the steep learning curve, having to render everything before you get a true idea of what it looks like, and you can’t really resize on the fly like you can in Illustrator.
The same goes for Photoshop, you can achieve really nice effects in the program but depending on how they’ve been done resizing can be a real issue. I’ll have to play around with making some icons in 3D and see what I can come up with.