Xamarin Studio Icon Through the Years

Xamarin Studio was an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for mobile and game developers who write in C# or F# and other languages. It was later rebranded to Visual Studio for Mac.

After I joined Xamarin in 2013, I designed all Xamarin Studio application icons:

— 2014: the first one (blue, with shaded ×) was created to announce the new UI theme in Xamarin Studio 5. Initially, it was rendered in Cinema 4D, and heavily tweaked in Photoshop – also because application icons need to be pixel-perfect in all required resolutions: 1024, 512, 256, 128, 96, 64, and mainly tricky 32 and 16 pixels.

— 2016: the last two icons (with gradients) announced brand new dark UI theme, with many new icons and visual improvements. This icon was done entirely in Photoshop and later redone in Affinity Designer to support full vector scalability.

Soon after, Xamarin Studio was rebranded, and the icon now reflects other products from the Visual Studio family.

Visual Studio for Mac has been improved in countless ways, with more features of the Windows counterpart coming.