Best way to create an application icon

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4639074

  •  08-10-2019
  •  | 
  •  

Question

What is the best way to create an icon for an application?

From Visual Studio or maybe some another program.

I create an icon in Visual Studio and use it as application icon, but when I put the icon shortcut on the desktop there is only some gray icon. Is this maybe because of icon dimensions or something else?

Was it helpful?

Solution

You simply can't beat IcoFX for the price and feature set.
It's one of my favorite programs, and it makes icon design incredibly easy. If you've been using MS Paint or the icon editor built into Visual Studio, you owe it to yourself to download IcoFX and give it a try.

Adobe Photoshop is the 300 pound gorilla here, but I think everyone who knows (or is willing to learn) how to use Photoshop already knows that.

But really, it might be the case that we developers are fooling ourselves if we think we're icon designers. Aside from a few specialized cases where you can't find the icon you need, you owe it to your users to use an existing icon library. Seriously, even with the best tools, could you design these? I didn't think so.

OTHER TIPS

The best image programs are the Adobe products. However, Paint.NET is a good free tool (see Create .ico files with Paint.NET).

In the project properties application tab in the Resources grouping, add the icon file to the Icon and Manifest section.

If you have no artistic skills, you should look at Iconfu. You can simply select a base icon and apply custom styles and colors to the icon.

If you like using Photoshop, there are many free icon export tools available, which is what I use personally

I've also created some nice ones with AWIcons Pro which has a free trial.

Here in our office, my co-worker uses Microangelo Icon Editor. He is a screen designer, so I assume he knows what he is doing.

Being a programmer, I would never ever dare to create icons on my own. I do not have the graphical skills. Usually I rely on third-party libraries like Icon Experience.

Licensed under: CC-BY-SA with attribution
Not affiliated with StackOverflow
scroll top