how do you create your app icons?

**motil** · Aug 19th, 2009, 05:39 AM

i'm trying to make an ico icon for my app notifyicon control, every image is scale (using photoshop) look distorted and "unclear" is there an acceptable method of creating ico that i'm not aware of ?

**mickey_pt** · Aug 19th, 2009, 05:43 AM

This is not a vb.net question...

But inside the IDE you have an "image editor" you can create your icons there.

Code:

Application Properties\Resources\New Icon

**motil** · Aug 19th, 2009, 05:44 AM

but i have an existing image i want to display as icon and not create of from scracth

**mickey_pt** · Aug 19th, 2009, 05:54 AM

Like i said that's not a question for this forum :P

But the only way that i know, it's after openning the image in photoshop, select image\image size... then set the new size (32x32 for example) and set the type for Bicubic Sharper...

**motil** · Aug 19th, 2009, 05:58 AM

did that, still distorted , well thank you anyway.

**Hack** · Aug 19th, 2009, 06:03 AM

Moved To General Developer

**mickey_pt** · Aug 19th, 2009, 06:08 AM

Distorted how? What's the original image size (pixels)? DPIs?

**motil** · Aug 19th, 2009, 06:10 AM

not looking clear, original size is 114,94 px and i scale it to 32,32 px

**mickey_pt** · Aug 19th, 2009, 06:15 AM

Can you post here the image...

**Runesmith** · Aug 19th, 2009, 06:40 AM

Originally Posted by motil

not looking clear, original size is 114,94 px and i scale it to 32,32 px

You need to either crop the image to 94 x 94 and scale it to 32 x 32, or pad it to 114 x 114 and scale to 32 x 32.

**motil** · Aug 19th, 2009, 06:44 AM

ok thanks i'll try it

**Jenner** · Aug 19th, 2009, 08:59 AM

Icons are a little tricky to make, especially if you want nice, alpha-blended edges to eliminate that jagged, chunky look older icons have. There's a professional image editing program out there called GIMP that's free to download and use. It's very powerful, possible just as powerful as Adobe Photoshop.

With it, you can make your icon and save it as a PNG file. Make a set of PNG files of various standard sizes: 64x64, 48x48, 32x32, 16x16. Then using another free tool called png2ico, bind them all together into an .ico file.

**motil** · Aug 19th, 2009, 09:01 AM

Thanks!

**Shaggy Hiker** · Aug 19th, 2009, 10:24 AM

Hey, that's great. Now, can anybody teach me to draw? My problem is not so much the size of the icon as my utter inability to draw, which makes the icon look like crap.

**motil** · Aug 19th, 2009, 10:27 AM

well, no one is perfect!

**mickey_pt** · Aug 19th, 2009, 10:46 AM

That's my problem to... Lack of ideas, design guidelines, and so on...

**motil** · Aug 19th, 2009, 11:32 AM

that's alright I'm not an artist nor designer as well, just some basic knowledge of PS

**Jenner** · Aug 19th, 2009, 03:03 PM

Most of the icons I make, I don't draw, I just fond some simple graphics, cut out the background, fix the edges, shrink to 32x32 and see if it's still recognizable. If it is, then I see of 16x16 is still halfway recognizable too. If that isn't, I may pencil in the 16x16 by hand. Making something on a 16x16 pallet isn't hard!

The beauty of icons, is that each size is a completely different picture, and thus, can be a completely different thing. An example is the icon for our flagship produxt. At 32x32, it's our product logo, a colorized, stylish image. At 16x16, that logo becomes totally unrecognizable, so we just used a simple white box with the company's initials "DS" in it.

**stanav** · Aug 25th, 2009, 02:12 PM

Originally Posted by motil

not looking clear, original size is 114,94 px and i scale it to 32,32 px

Of course the resized image will look distorted because the aspect ratio wasn't maintained when you resize it.

**BytePtr** · Aug 26th, 2009, 04:07 AM

Usually i just create the main icon from some pictures. Or just use the freeware ones (for toolbars, menus, etc).

**chris128** · Aug 27th, 2009, 02:29 PM

I havent got the time or the skill to make anything that looks nice, so I just bought about 60000 icons from here a while ago: http://www.iconshock.com/

**stanav** · Aug 27th, 2009, 02:36 PM

Originally Posted by chris128

I havent got the time or the skill to make anything that looks nice, so I just bought about 60000 icons from here a while ago: http://www.iconshock.com/

You don't mind telling us how much it cost you for the 60000 icons you bought, do you?

**chris128** · Aug 27th, 2009, 02:50 PM

That was a typo actually, it was 600000 not 60000 (came on 40 DVDs or something) - it cost about £200 I think. Which is a lot of money just for some images... but a lot less than any other icon company I found when comparing the quantity, quality and the amount of different formats you get the icons in. As I'm using WPF to make nice looking applications I figured it was worth actually getting some decent looking images to go in them instead of ruining them with my own custom creations. I mean there is no way I could make anything that looked remotely as good as this: http://www.iconshock.com/icon-sets/s...ing-icons.html

EDIT: Looks like they have since added another 100000 icons to the collection as well

**stanav** · Aug 27th, 2009, 03:21 PM

Thanks Chris... Yeah, their icons look very good and the prices are very resonable too.

**Jenner** · Aug 27th, 2009, 03:47 PM

Which deal did you buy? I see the link you showed has 3360 icons for $129 US, where's the 600,000 one?

**chris128** · Aug 27th, 2009, 03:51 PM

yeah its weird, they have this mega deal which they dont seem to advertise until after you say you want to buy one of the normal sets. Basically when you add a set to your cart and then try and pay it asks if you want to pay an extra £100 for the entire current collection (or an extra £200 for the vector based Adobe Illustrator source files as well etc).

**Jenner** · Aug 28th, 2009, 08:19 AM

AH! Ok, I see it now. Yea, when you click on Buy Now, they give you the option for a subscription which allows you to download anything on their site for $370 US for the next 6 months or something. That's a pretty cool find.

I wish they'd advertise that factoid up front because I always shied away from the site because I thought you could ONLY buy the things set-by-set. If you see an icon you want to use in this set and another in this set over here, and a third in this set here, that's $375 you've spent already and you only have 3 icons you actually want, and 9000 you probably don't.

**chris128** · Aug 28th, 2009, 09:06 AM

Yeah I think its pretty daft that they dont advertise it as well. I would never have even attempted to buy from them if DeanMc hadnt told me about that deal..

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