There must be a better way... of finding an icon

[steve65]

All right now I started playing with tool bars and so now I need icons. So here come the icon questions.

I have about 12,000 icon files on my machine, more than enough I should think (I went on a download spree some time back). By the way is there a good site that icons that are categorized by size, color depth, subject matter, etc.

What color depth should you really use for your toolbar, now I am just starting out so please keep the newbieness in mind? Does it matter? Why?

Is it possible using Microangelo or another program to pull all of the 16 x 16 x 256 color icons to a separate file and then save them? I have hosed Microangelo trying to look at all of my icons at once.

All I am trying to do is find a good-looking 16X16 pen at true color

Thanks for the help

[laserman]

I have tried vbaccelerator.com and there are some nice ones.

Hope this helps.

Sorry if not

[laserman]

www.vbaccelerator.com

[steve65]

Thanks I'll take a look at what they have. I was able to get the ones I needed for the project I am working on now.

[Red Rush-In]

90% of the icons out there aren't worth a flip. (As if all those comic book character icons could be used for anything remotely useful.)

You might check out
http://www.deviantart.com/
for some better looking icons. They have an Icon section on their site. You will have to dig a bit, but the quality of the submitted icons is generally pretty good.

As far as making icons, I like to start out in PhotoShop and then transfer the images to Microangelo for just minor adjustments and converting to ico files.

Originally posted by steve65
What color depth should you really use for your toolbar, now I am just starting out so please keep the newbieness in mind? Does it matter? Why?

If you notice that all the icons that Microsoft provides with Visual Studio are only 16 colors. If a user has their color depth of their display lower than the color depth of your icons they will look really weird. Try it yourself. Now on my Windows 2000 computer I'm using right now, the lowest you can go is 256 colors. But I think Windows 95 goes down to 16 colors. You can of course get around this by storing multiple color depths within the same ico file.

[-=XQ=-]

If you see a nice icon on your machine in an exe or dll you can use this function to get it... here.

[steve65]

I have been going the PSP, Microangelo route. I am using 256 colors but my drawing and imagination skills leave a lot to be desired. It took me like 30 minutes to do a exclamation point and it didn't look any better after I started then before but I am trying. I mean you look at the 32x32 icons on some of these web pages and you wonder how they do it. Well at least I wondered how they did it.