Icons Used on Mindprod.com

User Configurable Icons

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:

1. They are miniature realistic pictures from which you should be able to distinguish completely the meaning without any hoverhelp or documentation.
2. They are buttons that can have totally abstract symbols on them. Their main function is to provide functionality in minimal screen real estate. You mainly want them easily distinguishable without close study. You should be able to hit them almost with peripheral vision. Colour-coded blobs would do just fine.
3. They are artistic decoration for the application.

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.

Editing Icons

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.

Icon XP

 Icon XP

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

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:

• Ability to export all the composite png images of an icon in a single command.
• Ability to edit general png images.
• Ability to add colourise to a black and white drawing, though you can change the hue of a colour image.
• Magic Wand to find a region with similar colours.
• Ability to edit the palette map.
• Ability to replace one colour with another. I fooled around for 30 minutes unable to get the feature to work.
• Various transforms to create 3D effects like those in Paint Shop Pro.
• Automatically update the smaller images when you edit the big one. I found I had to delete the small images and recreate them to get it to notice the changes to the big version.
• The undo feature does not always work by hitting Ctrl-Z the way it does in most other programs. You have to click the undo icon.
• Preview test on various backgrounds.

Tips

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 $60.00 USD 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.

CMP Free Icons

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.” ~ anonymous
	download	blue whale	This is blue whale, the largest animal that ever existed.