Re: Tools for creating icons
Re: Tools for creating icons
- Subject: Re: Tools for creating icons
- From: "M. Uli Kusterer" <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 20:15:53 +0100
At 10:18 Uhr -0800 21.03.2005, Kevin Callahan wrote:
How about IconFamily by Troy Stephens - I hear great things about it.
http://homepage.mac.com/troy_stephens/software/objects/IconFamily/
I guess the point to be made is what you're looking for: A tool for
drawing icons, or a tool for turning drawings into .icns files. For
the latter, Icon Composer (part of Apple's Dev Tools) is probably
your cheapest option. IconFamily is code that does the same, but it's
more useful if you want to add .icns export to an existing app, or if
you want your app to save preview icons. For the actual drawings,
it's not as easy.
Basically, any drawing program that supports alpha channels works.
Icon Composer allows dropping Photoshop files, TIFF files, PNG files
and lots of other image file formats on it, so any app that can
generate those with Alpha will do. I personally use Photoshop
Elements, but its filters and alpha channels are crippled, and I'd
probably go for Photoshop CS these days, which seems to be about the
same price but has more features.
If you're not too good at drawing yourself, I'd suggest you use a
vector drawing program. In ye olde days, pixel graphics editors could
be used as well, but today, with 128x128 pt icons, they're really not
that convenient anymore. You'd only want those to touch up the
smaller icon sizes.
If you're good at drawing, it mainly depends on personal preferences,
but in that case the tools aren't really important. Apps that support
layers are usually handy, because icons typically consist of multiple
parts. To get nice surface structures for your objects, apps that do
filters and gradients. And a good scaling algorithm is also handy,
because Icon Composer isn't at all good at making vaguely
recognizable smaller representations of your icons.
And then of course you could just hire someone who knows what they're
doing and have them do your icons.
--
Cheers,
M. Uli Kusterer
------------------------------------------------------------
"The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
http://www.zathras.de
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