I am presenting to you my first attempt at creating icons. I initially intended these icons to be for personal use only but I thought that others might find them interesting as well, so I am sharing them for FREE. You can download these icons through the link provided at my deviantART page. Please don’t redistribute these icons as your own.

Adobe CS3 Master Coll. Icons by GeloTon on deviantART

Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

The PNG set was created with Adobe Photoshop Extended CS3, and was subsequently converted to ICO (for Windows) and ICNS (for Macintosh) formats using Axialis IconWorkshop version 4.2 (Trial Version). The RAR package includes 33 files (11 256×256-px PNGs and 11 icons each for Win and Mac, plus the cover image shown above).

All background images for the icons were taken from the Adobe website, and I claim no right over them. All software names on the icons are trademarks of the Adobe Corporation.

Since this is my first attempt at creating icons, I would like to hear your comments and suggestions. Please be constructive. I would also like to receive feedback regarding the Mac icons because I don’t know if they would display properly (I don’t have that operating system). Please leave your messages here or at my deviantART page.

I initially thought that creating icons was as simple as dragging and dropping images to some ICO converter. Yes, icons can be created that way, and there are also online icon converters out there, such as ConvertIco.com and ConvertIcon.com. But to ensure that your icons will display properly on most platforms and various resolutions, you need to compile several image files (each corresponding to a certain resolution) into a single icon. There are many icon converter applications that you can download from the Internet, but many of them don’t offer this functionality. Thus, I recommend both Axialis IconWorkshop and Gamani GIF Movie Gear. Both software allow conversion of different types of image formats (including JPG, GIF, PNG, TGA, even PSD) and also to convert Win icons to Mac ones, and vice versa. I am using only the trial versions, so I am not sure about other features yet. I repeat: these are not freeware. Quality-wise, I think that the icons created with IconWorkshop look better than those made with the other.

In my search for articles that could help me with the problem with icons losing their quality when viewed on a different icon size, I found the following ones appropriate to my level of understanding as a beginner: Icon Design: Sizing, Icon Design: Anti-Aliasing, Icon Design: Bitmap vs Vector, Introducing Windows Vista Icons, and 7 Principles of Effective Icon Design.

I hope this article can be of help to those of you who wish to learn about or improve skills on icon creation, like myself.

UPDATE 04/27/08

As suggested:
Changed Acrobat Icon logo to red for better visibility
Added Lightroom Icon to expand the collection