With the advent of hover help (aka tooltips), it is much less important that you can glean the secret meaning of an icon just by looking at it. What is more important is that you can tell it apart from the other icons with just a glance. Icons should be bold and clear, not fussy little portrait miniatures. People with less acute eyesight need simpler icons. An example of poor icons is Funduc Search/Replace where every icon looks like pair of binoculars unless you stare at it closely. For examples of good icons look at some of the award-winning Opera button sets.
The other problem with icons is aesthetic. If you design icons in isolation, then lump them together on the screen, they will look like the equivalent of a ransom note. They need some unifying themes. Professional artists know how to get the right balance.
Most icons are only 32x32 bits. You must use a considerable amount of anti-aliasing in your designs to get clear looking images.
I am quite astonished that very few companies have created a corporate icon to represent themselves compactly in web references on other people’s sites. I suggest that every company should create a corporate icon, in 16x16, 24x24, 32x32, 64x64 and 128x128 format, a corporate logo in 128x48, 256x48 and 384x48 format, and a corporate banner in 400x40 and 468x60 format, and post them on their website for others to use in sending them business. By providing icons in these standard sizes, the logos of other companies will nicely line up when displayed with the logos of other companies. There is less need to standardize on formats or colour depth. It is easy enough to convert the logos to the same colour depth and recording format. Now where is that round TUIT in need to create such logos for myself?
There also needs to be a scheme to automatically propagate new versions of the logos.
There are three theories of icon design:
You can test your icon designs for the visually challenged by seeing if you can tell them apart reading them from across the room. They can contain detail, but the detail must not be significant. Such icons are more efficient for people with normal vision too, though they may not look quite as elegant.
I find grouping icons helps a lot rather than just placing them in long rows or blocks.
Icon designers are overly fond of blue. This means the icons are hard to tell apart in small sizes. You can either modify the colours, or replace them entirely with icons you find with Google image search. Just right click properties on the shorcut to replace the *.ico file.
It is missing a useful simple feature, the ability resize to 50%. You must calculate the image size width and height yourself. To use the smoothing function, you must turn on high-colour and alpha-channel. It does not seem to have a way to reduce the colour depth and maintain alpha-channel transparency. The more I used it, the more I liked it. I own a copy.
Axialis supports formats from 16x16 up to 256x256, allowing you to pack multiple versions of the icon in the same file. Axialis also lets you control transparency along with colour. This lets you create transparent icon has blend nicely int backgrounds of any colour. It lets you export icons as transparent png files so you can use them in Java or HTML. The most magical thing it does is the way it resizes. The resized images look very sharp because they are anti-aliased. Axialis uses automatically computed blended colours to give the illusion of finer resolution than is really there. See my moose icon in many resolutions done by taking a *.gif and feeding it to Axialis without any touch up. You can also get it to compute drop shadows to give the icons that soft XP look. It is specialised for icons. You can’t even edit images. It will generate all the smaller layers automatically if you create the big image. It does not have any of the special effects of Photo Shop or Paint Shop Pro. It has a library of image objects, you can combine to create icons. It creates install bundles so you can sell collections of your icons. It does not let you resize a document by percentage, but at least it will optionally maintain the aspect ratio. For such as expensive slick-looking program, it is missing features you would expect such as:
Don’t attach your icon to a program until it is in its final form. I find it quite difficult to replace the icon with another. Old versions seem to get stuck in cache and it takes a reboot to clear.
When you buy icons, make sure your license allows you to include them in your distributed software and/or on your website.
The Iconshock people have a clever promotion. They will send you a random sample
of free icons every 15 days to do with as you please in return for you
advertising them with a text or banner link on your website. You are allowed to
trade these icons with others. You have to take quite difficult vision and
typing and ESP test to be allowed to participate. Read up on validation
codes to learn how to “cheat”.
777icons.com: will create
custom icons for about
each. This is quite a time consuming process, to get the icon just the way you
want, so don’t leave it to the last minute. Leave at least a month. I
discovered they outsource the work to the Ukraine. They make the icons with Xara
and correct them in Adobe Photoshop. Each individual size has to be manually
corrected; that’s why it costs extra to get the extra resolutions and why
larger resolutions cost more. There are more pixels to correct.
| Icons You May Use Freely On Your Own Website and and in Your Own Applications | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Icon
shown 128 × 128 |
Download | Purpose | Description |
| download | JWS
Java Web Start |
a winged coffee bean being launched by a spring. It suggests whimsically launching the Java app into the air, like launching a rocket. You might use the icon for the .jnlp extension. | |
| download | JDK
Java Development Kit |
Sun’s public domain Duke chararacter dressed as a full-figured carpenter carrying a tool kit containing a saw. You might use the icon for the .java extension. | |
| download | JRE
Java Runtime Environment |
Sun’s public domain Duke chararacter as a runner, stripped down and lean, to suggest the bare essentials needed to run Java applications. He is wearing a yellow jersey, suggestive of the yellow jersey worn by the front runner in la Tour de France bicycle race. You might use the icon for the .class extension. | |
| download | woodpecker | Woodpecker. I am not sure what precise species this one is supposed to be.
It looks a bit like a golden fronted woodpecker. The image was only intended to
represent a generic woodpecker. Check out whatbird.com
search for excellent bird illustrations to help you identify species.
“If engineers built buildings the way computer programmers designed buildings, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilisation.” | |
| download | blue whale | This is blue whale, the largest animal that ever existed. | |
![]() |
and suggestions to improve this page to Roedy Green : | ||
| Canadian Mind Products | |||
| mindprod.com IP:[65.110.21.43] | |||
| Your face IP:[38.103.63.16] | The information on this page is for non-military use only. | ||
| You are visitor number 19,725. | Military use includes use by defence contractors. | ||
| You can get a fresh copy of this page from: | or possibly from your local J: drive (Java virtual drive/Mindprod website mirror) | ||
| http://mindprod.com/jgloss/icon.html | J:\mindprod\jgloss\icon.html | ||