Simple iOS icon

I am finally making some real progress on my first iOS application, and I thought up a nice, simple icon design (just wait, you will see it soon) as well as a color pattern.  I have never actually submitted an iOS application to Apple, so I do not know the guidelines off the top of my head.  Fortunately, that information is easy to find.

Unfortunately, it is not as simple as using the Icon Composer App on the Mac OSX system.  I will need to generate all the icon sizes I want (depending on the app target) myself.  They all need to be square, and the biggest must be 1024 x 1024 pixels.  Since I want the app to be both usable on iPhone and iPad, I will also need 57 x 57, 72 x 72, 114 x 114, and 144 x 144.  Whew.  At least iOS does all the heavy lifting of creating round corners, drop shadows, and the reflective shine.  So kind.

I will only need three colors (two, if you don't count black), and since this app is based upon the tremendous education I received at Washington State University, I decided to use their color scheme of crimson and gray, with the following specific color details:

CRIMSON
RGB 152/30/50
CMYK 0/100/65/34 

GRAY
RGB 94/106/113
CMYK 11/0/0/65 

I would like to set up both of those as part of my Inkscape palette, just in case I feel the need to use them again in the future.

One would think that making a nice square, all one color, would be straightforward.  Well, if it is, I cannot figure it out.  First, I made a new Inkscape document using the Desktop template, since one of the dimensions was 1024 pixels.  I then went into the Document Properties, and made it 1024 by 1024. So far, so good.

Since I could NOT figure out how to color the background, I decided to make a square shape the exact dimensions of the document.  I clicked on the Rectangle button, and drew a shape on the page, adjusting the dimensions to 1024 and 1024:

Of course, it needs to line up perfectly with the document, so I clicked the Select and Transform button, and entered 0 (zero) in each of the X and Y windows:

That lined everything up famously.  Now, in the Object --> Fill and Stroke panel, I entered the RGB data for CRIMSON (see above), and put the alpha to 255:

 Resulting the background that I wanted:

For the actual icon image, all I want is a perfect circle with a small slice cut out of it.  Don't ask me why.  It's just what I want.

I selected the circle object, changed the fill to match the GRAY RGB data (above), entered 20 in the Start angle box, and clicked on the segment tool:

Holding the control key, I drew a quick circle, then I adjusted the dimensions to 900 x 900, filling most of the background.  Subtracting 900 from 1024 resulted in 124, and half of that made 62, which I entered into the X and Y registers, after clicking on Select and Transform.  That centered the circle nicely:

I could not discover any clever method to get one segment to point directly and straight  upwards, so I just kept rotating it until it looked right.

I think the 900 is too big, so I reduced it to 800:

Hmmmm.  No, still too big.  How about 700?

Much better.  I had originally planned to add black lines (like clock hands) to the radii, but I think I will leave it like this.  I do believe that the gray is too dark as well.  I do not know enough about color to change it, so I will do some reading and see what I find.  At this point, the gray works out to be hexadecimal 5e6a71ff.  That is probably a clue to lightening it up a bit.

Replacing the hex with c5c5c5ff, it was just a bit too light.  Using c0c0c0ff, I get this:

A reasonable compromise.  Now, for the exporting into different sizes.  Export Bitmap works fine, but is a bit clunky.

Changing the size works fine, but I did not mess with the dpi. The clunkiness comes when changing the filename every time the size is changed.  Instead of trying to type into the Filename text field, I kept clicking Browse, because it highlighted the filename directly.  I could then change the filename right then.  However, then I had to go back and click Export to make it happen.

I only need to put the icons in the app and see how they look.