[fdsary]

I'm a programmer, and know very little about art (sadly).

The picture in the background here is very beautiful. Someone who makes that kind of thing, how do they do it? How do they chose colours, and how would they go about making the shapes actually appear on a screen?

[MrAlmostWrong]

While I can't speak on how the designer of this particular piece created the shapes you see, in Sketch I would create a shape (the flower petal) and then do "rotate copies". Do that a couple of times with the different size shapes and give each layer a different opacity (ability to see through the shape). Making it a black background with high opacity and layering them on top of each other provides for the cool effects.

Then place a rectangle background with a gradient on it that transitions from purple to green like in the graphic.

[freehunter]

It looks like a small handful of semi-transparent shapes (they look like leaves to me) with different colors that are overlayed on each other. Since they're different semi-transparent colors, the colors blend to form a new shade where they have overlapped. Repeat this a few times with logic that rotates the leaf around the axis a little below the bottom center of the screen, and there you have it.

[derefr]

Yep. It's just a more gradated version of the iOS Photos app icon. It's pretty easy to see what makes the simpler version look the way it does, when you blow it up[1]: there are just eight translucent roundrects with gradients, and everything else emerges from how they overlap.

(And from the fact that the gradients form a complete hue continuum. Look at the small triangles in the middle to see the destination colors, and see how they match the source colors of their neighbours.)

[1] http://www.icreatemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Pr...

[morcheeba]

Probably Inkscape or Illustrator. But mostly a good sense for color and design.

[wonderyak]

Patterns, transperency and lots and lots of time.

[higherpurpose]

Magic.

Or Photoshop.