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Tuesday, 17 August 2004

Creating icons

The final creative step in creating WimpWall was to design a new icon to replace the default Delphi one. This is an essential step in creating a professional program. No matter how simple it is, you must have a unique icon.

I had two main problems. I am not good at designing icons, and I don't have any (working) icon design software. Delphi actually comes with an image editor, but for some reason it would only save corrupted icons for me. So, I abandoned that and had a quick look for a free icon editor on the net.

My requirements were: small, completely free (no nags or ads), load and save BMP and ICO, and a functional UI. I found all of these satisfied in @icon sushi. There were larger, more functional programs around, but being small is a virtue to me.

Finally, after a few brief aborted efforts, I again concluded that designing icons was far beyond me, so I grabbed the Mandelbrot icon from JM's Mandelbrot Explorer (which was created by that program), imported it into Photoshop, changed the hue, and saved it as a new icon. I'll just use a family of Mandebrot icons for all my software in future.