How to...

Create an icon

In contrary to the common belief, icons are not just small, partially transparent images. Most icons contain more than one page. These pages are different in size and/or color depth, helping the operating system to choose the icon page most suitable for the current purpose.

So creating an icon means drawing an image in several sizes and color depths. Vista recommends that all icon have a 256x256 @ 32-bit page, for which all other pages all derived. Maybe the most important image formats are the following:

Note that the color depth cannot be specified explicitly in GFIE, it is updated dynamically according to the picture contents. For example, if you want to create a page in 256 colors, draw an image which has at most 256 colors and does not have semi-transparent pixels.

Converting an existing image to an icon

  1. Open the existing image file.
  2. If it has multiple pages, select the page you want to create the new icon from.
  3. Choose the menu item Icon|Create icon from image and put a check to the formats you want to create.

The newly created icon may have pages with the same size and color depth. For example, there is no such format as 16x16 @ 24-bit, since that page would have 256 pixels and that means at most 256 different colors - so the format is rather 16x16 @ 256 colors. In this case, you should remove the duplicate pages to avoid redundancy.

Testing your icon

See this article.