Icon art

[gare]

I've been dabbling with icon art since Microangelo v1.0; some software icons are either vague or just painful to look at! And I use Allume's DragStrip 3.83; it lets you define a drive to lauch, but default folder icons aren't very useful.

I recently bought Aha-Soft's Icon Lover suite and it positively blows Microangelo out of the water. It's $49, but I splurge occasionally (thank you, Pay-Pal? ). It'll save an icon to 32-bit--an 8-bit alpha channel included...Micro only does a 1-bit mask. You can import pngs w/ transparency and psds (saved out of PS CS 2, to boot).

So I did a little icon library to share with you all. Copy it and when you want to change an icon, choose Change icon from the Properties list, but you need to type *.icl in the Files of Type because Windows only searches for ico files. The file appears, you choose it, and a scrolling window appears and you can choose the icon. I tried to make common icon categories: drives, text documents, and paint/draw programs.

I also did two animated cursors you can load from Control Panel>Mouse>Pointers. I defined the hotspot at 0,0.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to do Mac icons. If anyone knows how and the interest is there, I'll post a sheet of my icons as a png to this thread.

Mini-art is HARD! Every pixel counts.

My Best,

Gare

[ricib]

Hey Gare, I tried to load the icons but it kept telling me I couldn't. I couldn't even load them in any icon editor. I'm probably doing something wrong though.

[gare]

Rick--

Try the new posted zip file attached to my previous post. I saved to the wrong format in IconLover--evidently, I have some stuff to learn...

My Best,

Gare

[ricib]

ah, that did it.

Very nice work!

[p?tr?]

Now thats old school - nice, Gare!
Ok, heres a couple I've made: a icon for pscs2 and an ie icon as well.

[gare]

p?tr??k---




What did you use 1.) to create 'em, and 2.) to convert them to icos? I have not idea how to use 96x96 pixel icons (I've only recently discovered their 32-bit capabilities); can you lend some advice?

I hope you don't mind my posting your artwork here, for all to appreciate. Folks, download p?tr??k's icl post-haste!

My Best,

Gare

Gare

[p?tr?]

Thanks, Gare!
Well, 1.) I used PS to make them (what else) 8} Then 2.) I exported as png and used Icon Developer to create the icons. I put the icons in 5 formats (16px, 32px, 48px, 64px, 96px) The large format is so anyone with object dock can use them. Go to www.stardock.com to download the free version of icon developer. You can also go to www.wincustomize.com to download all sorts of icons/themes/whatever!

[gare]

p?tr??k--

I haven't tried IconDeveloper, but I surely will--who knows; it might be better than Aha's Icon Lover. I'll be posting another icl soon.

BTW, I bought the StarDock suite and love it. I've grown weary of Windows' themes, and I'm using the Longhorn interface. And the default icons are easier on the eyes than Win's dlls.

My Best,

Gare

[Welles]

If anybody is interested in making icons for OS X, here is a super tutorial. Actually it's a good tutorial on making icons in Photoshop but uses a couple of other Mac programs to save the ico files. OS X uses 128 x 128 px icons.

[gare]

Welles,

Where's that link?

My Best,
Gare