This part is more of a tip than anything. You may find yourself follow a completely different workflow path. Don't feel limited by these parapgraphs.
As much as it sounds ancient and silly, it's very helpfull to start with a piece of paper and pencil before turning to your high-performance graphic workstation. Don't worry if your drawing resembles the one of your 4 year old son, you're trying to think of simple metaphores and lay down ideas. You are not trying to be the next Michelangelo.
You usually have an easier job when thinking of the metaphore because the icon probably exist in the regular gnome stock set. In most cases it is not necersary to change the metaphore, only simplify the pictured object enough to be recognised and still be visible after applying the methods described in Section , “Testing Your Artwork”.
Set up your artboard to the suggested 48x48 points. Create a rough polygon of the shape you put down on paper.
On many of the icons there's elements you can "borrow" from other icons. Because this is vector art it's possible to rotate, scale and modify the shapes without harming quality. If you have been doing bitmap art till now, it will surelly appeal to you as much as it did to me. Vector icons rock!
Because Illustrator doesn't seem to be able to stroke only the outside of a path, I usually create a copy of the object below and stroke with a double-thick line. For complex object I usually copy all objects that create the silhuette and join them together befor estroking - having a single object is faster to render and makes the SVG smaller in size.
Once you have at least some basic shape of the icon, it is time to look at it at small size (48x48px) from a greater distance to check if the shape is clear enough and visible.
After the icon is finished, don't forget to stroke the outside silhuette with a white line.
It is now time to test the artwork and add the metadata as described in sections Section , “Descriptions” and Section , “Testing Your Artwork”