Even in case you’re not a professional icon designer having a sence of beauty and knowing some background of icon design would doubtly be useless. Therefore here’re a few links youmay find useful:
- Tango project. An excellent icon design guideline (plus a set of CC- licensed icons), started byNovell designers. Some pages to pay closer attention to: http://tango-project.org/ArtLibreSet, a set of icons for graphics editing applications, http://tango-project.org/Generic_Icon_Theme_Guidelines, general Tango-style icon design guidelines. Plus http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Gallery, a ready to use icon set.
Overall, Tango seems to be the best and the only useable set of icons, licensed under fair conditions and thus suitable for low-budget projects. - Original Creating Windows XP icons guide by Microsoft. Must know for anyone related to Windows interface graphics.
- iTunes icon creation tutorial. Great for learning some icon designing techniques in Illustrator.
- A history of AllTunes graphics by Mezich (rus). Might be useful if you wish to learn some tricks from highly professional designers.
- Adam Betts’ blog entry on icon weight.Especially useful fornovice artists.
- A history of making a Thunderbird icon. Learn from gurus
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- Turbomilk blog. Blog, nearly entirely dedicated to professional icon design.
- What makes a good icon? Quite an interesting article on creating really outstanding icons.
- ArtLebedev’s icon reflection trick (rus). It’s an interesting hack, but not a common solution
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- Alpha on Windows XP toolbars. 8 bit vs 32 bit icons on Windows XP toolbars.
- Bitmap vs vector. A very good article on bitmap vs vector icon design approaches.
- Some free icon sets. Icons, distributed under the terms of GNU, CC, GPL and LGPL licenses.
And, finally, my own small article on vector vs bitmap icons.
Enough for today. Have a good reading!
