Apr 27 2009
Create your own Icons, Free
Icons have illustrated Macintosh desktops as long as they have been around. Now with OS X and the advent of 128×128 icons, you can squeeze even more detail into your icons. After all, if you couldn’t customize it, it wouldn’t be a Mac.
Before we get into creating icons of our own, we’ll look at converting existing icons into something we can edit. Icon2PNG extracts icon resources (OS X and classic) and saves them with their masks as PNG files. This app also gives us a preview of the icon before saving it and includes more options in the preferences.
This program will allow us to create icons from the contents of graphic files or their thumbnails. Iconverter can even batch convert a whole directory. Once converted, it saves your icon as a Mac icon file, Windows icon or one of several graphics formats with the icon set as the documents thumbnail.
Here’s another free application that will make you a proud icon creator. Pic2Icon uses an image file to create a 128×128 icon and them applies it to the original image file. Settings allow you to apply antialiasing, drop shadow and even a dog ear to the icon. Be careful with Photoshop image files, as this app has a hard time replacing existing thumbnail icons. You can use Preview to save a “clean” version to process.
Now that you’ve created some killer icons, share them with your Windows friends. This simple drag-and-drop app translates Mac icons to the Windows ico format. This is also a useful conversion if you are making favicons for your web site.
Now you have the tools to plaster your system with custom icons, you have nothing but your own nepotism to hold you back! I’ll be back again next week with more great free downloads…
Brian
Downloads provided by MacUpdate