October 10th, 2014. Bold, daring, delightful – all those words come to mind when describing Audax. “When we set out to create our first circular icon pack, we knew we needed a standout visual presentation,” said Dave Kover, Lead Designer. “With Audax, we’ve taken some great design cues and combined them into a finished product which pops off your device.”

With just a hint of 3D on the base, Audax icons bring new dimensionality to your home screens.

kovdev strives to bring a unique, but familiar experience to Android devices. Their icon packs are listed in the top ranks of the Personalization category on Google Play with consistent high-mark user reviews. While always pushing the boundaries of icon design, kovdev also brings convenient features to users via their theme dashboard.

Audax is available on Google Play on Friday, October 10th, 2014. It will go on sale for $1.99 and includes over 2000 icons and 30+ unique wallpapers.

Flat design has been the trending, and leading, design mantra for over a year now. We didn’t want to stray too far from that style, but at the same time wanted to be able to offer something a bit different than some of the other products that have been coming to market recently. The icons feature our signature flat glyphs. These time-tested images are strategically placed on a faux-3D backing, which elevates them off the screen. Subtle shadowing finishes off the effect, giving you a truly unique visual experience.

Domo is now available on Google Play. It includes over 1650 icons and 20 unique wallpapers, exclusive to our collection. We’ll be continuing to increase the icon portfolio, as we do with all of our releases, as the year continues.

We’ve always been a fan of the curves that are seen on iOS device homescreens, so we’ve given this design a bold radius. If you have seen our previous icon packs, you’ll know that we love color. Big, bright color. That’s why we’ve decided to take a different approach this time. You’ll find a lovely subdued palette with a matte finish. We’re no longer screaming for your attention, with this design, but allowing your eyes to discover the crisp visuals naturally.

With Nox, we brought the long shadow into our designs. Suffice to say, we’re still in love with the concept. However, we have a taken a different approach to the design feature this time. What you’ll find is a more multi-dimensional, almost layered shadow. It also has a stronger gradient to give it a bit more of a unique appeal. All your favorite glyphs have returned as well as some unique enhancements made specifically for Lumos. We’re really excited for you all to see of the new designs that we’ve crafted.

Lumos is available, starting today, on Google Play! We’d love to see what you do with the icons, so make sure to post your screenshots onto Twitter and Google+ with the #Lumos hashtag!

In case you are undecided about Lumos, we’ve got a demo copy available for you to check out the design. It contains a collection of system and Google apps which will give you a good feel of the overall flavor that the icons can bring to your homescreens.

What is a keystore? When developers are building an application to be published onto Google Play, they sign the product using this unique key. This prevents a malicious third-party from releasing a counterfeit version of the application. To read more about the keystore and signing process, see this article from the Android team.

End-of-life Status

We are no longer able to sign the Tersus 1.0 application and therefore can no longer upload new versions to Google Play. Because of this, we are discontinuing updates to the product. If you own a copy of Tersus, you can continue to use it on your device. However, we will be removing it from Google Play at the end of the year, so download a final copy from the link at the bottom of this page.

Instead of just abandoning the design, we’ve been hard at work refining the original style. Tersus is now around 1.5 years old and hasn’t really kept up with the high standards we strive for. The adjustments we’ve made now exhibit more polish and cohesive visuals for the entire set.

INCREASED RADIUS

Originally, Tersus icons were 72×72 pixels. With the new screen density increases, we now render the icons at 144×144. Due to the resizing process, the icons lost a bit of their rounded feel. We’ve now corrected this and are really happy with the new curves. The icons feel a lot more comfortable on homescreens now.

LIGHTING TWEAKS

The original icon style was missing a distinct visual signature (aside from the silhouette). We’ve added a small highlight to the top of the icons, as well as given them all a constant gradient. These little details have made a huge impact on the overall feel of the icon set when swiping through the app drawer. We’ve fallen back in love with Tersus.

What happens now?

We’ve released Tersus 2.0 on Google Play at a price of $0.99. This discounted price is for our users, who we hope will join us in this new release. We’ll be raising the price on the product, in a month from release, to bring it in line with the rest of our styles. Unfortunately, we are not able to transfer licenses from Tersus 1.0 to the new version.* With the design changes, the new Tersus icons feel like a brand new collection. We hope that you’ll grab a copy of this upgraded version and enjoy the enhanced visuals.

What is a keystore?

When a developer is going to release a product onto Google Play, the physical file (apk) is signed with a key. This is similar to the signature you use to sign checks and other official documents. This key is what certifies that the product has come from the official source/developer. For example, we have App A, which is signed by Key A. If you attempt to update App A, by signing it with Key B, your Android device would tell you that the products have mismatching signatures. This is a security feature and one that is certainly needed. This is where our issue lies.

Once you’ve uploaded a product onto Google Play with a specific signature, you can only update the app with that same keystore. Due to unforeseen circumstances out of our control, one of our keystores was corrupted during our transition last week. The affected product is Tersus. The only way for us to move forward supporting this product, via Google Play, is to re-list it with a new package name. This will require individuals to purchase a new license for this product, as it is affectively a new package (despite it only being a name change). Unfortunately, there is no way for us to transfer a license from the old product to the new or we would certainly go down that route. Because of this, we are are giving that style a re-design.

Photoshop and actions

For our design process, Photoshop is our main software. Over time, we’ve built a library of actions which enable us to produce graphical assets faster and smarter. If we had to do all of the work by hand, for each icon, there would be far less updates as the time needed for icon creation would be exponentially longer. Not just for icons, but for most areas of our theme making process, we’ve created actions or other assets to assist us. Unfortunately, due to a major oversight, all of our tools were lost.

Luckily, our icon themselves were not a part of the data loss. Because of this, we’ve been working to reverse engineer the styles in order to be able to re-create them. We’ve made huge progress and are happy to announce that we’re almost back to 100% operations for new icons. Of our signature styles, Lustre and Versicolor are going to be slightly modified from their original design.

What’s next?

We’re still working to bring all of our systems back online. Due to these recent events, our next icon update has been pushed back by at least another week. When we do update, we’ll be releasing a revised version of Tersus (dubbed 2.0), which we will be replacing that set moving forward. We were hoping to bring some new designs to market, but it looks like plans will be pushed back to 2014. Thanks for your continued support!

To request icons, use our request form – do not send them as an activity report at this time. They will be ignored. Icon Request Form.

Premium Requests

We now offer premium requests. With our current icon request queue over 4000 apps long, it may be up to 4 years before you see an icon added. If you don’t want to wait that long for your favorite icon, you can now jump the line and get your icon created within the next 2 updates. Just to reiterate, we are still adding icons as we always have. This new option is just available for those who really don’t want to wait. You’ll find a link above in the menu.

New icons

Atom Launcher support

With 2013 coming to a close, we are happy to launch our newly refined website. We’ve got a renewed focus on presenting our products clearly and giving them the attention they deserve. We’ve refined our product line recently and this is the perfect way to showcase our signature styles. We’ve also brought some user requested pages to our website.

Icon List

At long last, you can see which icons are included in our products before purchasing. The FAQ page contains the same information that is available within the dashboard of our products. Again, this is easily accessible for potential users, prior to purchase.

Icon Requests

We’ve made icon requesting even easier by directly embedding the form into our website. No more having to remember some weird bit.ly link or a long-form Google Drive URL.

Premium Requests

As more and more people use our products, the list of requested icons has surged. We know how important it is for people to have all their icons themed the same and we’re now offering this premium option for those who don’t want to wait for their requests to come up in the queue. For $10, you’ll be able to choose the application you deem most urgent and bump it to the head of the line. This guarantees that your request will be included in 1-2 updates. Normal requests are still going to fulfilled, but this extra option is now available if needed.

Stay tuned for new products and more from kovdev in 2014.

We recently released a new series of icons called Versicolor. They are a chiclet style, based off Tersus. Each icon has a custom color ring which is engineered to match the icon content. We also offer a few static color band sets that wrap each icon in a specific color set-wide. Of course, the set also comes with a brand new set of wallpapers. These were crafted specifically for the icon set.

We also recently went through a major update push for all of our Phlash themes. They now all include over 1600 icons! Quite the library available at your fingertips and ready for your customization needs. Check all of them out on our Google Play storefront.

We apologize about our lack of updates here. We’ve been super busy working on the 2.0 dashboard which recently was re-designed. Yep, a re-design before release. The dashboard is now in a limited beta and will be making its way in limited release to our signature themes. As always, stay tuned.

Theme update status

We’ve been working really hard to continue to bring all of our current themes to as many launchers/apps as possible. Go Launcher continues to update it’s theme structure which has left us with a couple delays as they add/remove features. It looks like they may have settled on a final base for the new style and we’re going to move forward with theming towards it. Tha Phlash has released tons of new styles over the past couple months and we’re really excited to bring some of them to you as soon as we can. As always, thank you for your continued support and feedback and we look forward to sharing new information and products with you soon!

Apex Theme Support

This is breaking news! Apex has just added theme support into their 1.2.0beta1 and have also released a theme template. We’re proud to announce that we’ve already integrated the support into Lustre and will continue to roll out that functionality to all present and future themes. It will take us some time, so bear with us as we work through all of this.

Work is steadily progressing on our 2.0 dashboard update! We hope to have more to share with everyone soon. Keep checking the market to see when your favorite theme is updated!