How to dress up your Mac –Chaning Icons (Advanced)

If you don’t know how to replace icon on your Mac yet, please read my previous post first. Now let’s go to a higher level and create your own icon sets.

Create your own icon on Mac (Advanced)

You can download thousands of icons online for your Mac, but trust me, if you are creative and want to be totally unique, you should not stay on the basic stages. Let me show you how you can create an icon that differs from any icons you could see.

Software requirement:

We will be using a couple of software, here is the list:

1. Apple’s Developer Tools, aka Xcode, you can download it from Apple’s official site.
2. Image editing software like Adobe Photoshop, if you don’t have it already, you can try a powerful open-source image processing software called GIMP.
3. Icns2Rsrc, we will be using this small utility to convert images into icon.

OK, let’s get started.

• Creating the image

You can download an image from Google or you can just draw your own icon. Either way, make sure your image is larger than 128px by 128px. Here is some tips for creating the icon image:

- Although the image itself is 128px by 128px, your main body (the icon) itself should be smaller than this so that the icon won’t look square. You can delete the background that you don’t need and make it transparent instead.

-Add a subtle shadow to the main icon; it will just make the icon looks much better when it comes into use.

When you are done and have an icon that you like, re-size it to 128×128 (in px) then save it as .PSD or .PNG file.

• Converting the image to icon

Install Apple’s Developer Tools in the list, then Icon Composer, it’s located in /Developer/Applications/Utilities/, if you can’t find it, just type in “Icon Composer” in Spotlight.Drag your PSD or PNG into the 128 box. If it asks you a couple of questions, always tell it to Use Scaled Version and Extract Mask. Once all the boxes are filled, go to File > Save As and save the icon in a convenient place.

Up to here, you are almost done and the last step is to convert the file you just got ( an ICNS file) to a RSRC file.

OK, now what’s next? Well, you’ve already got the file, please follow the method I show you in the previous post above to change your icon.

I hope you like this little write-up, if you have any questions, please let me know. Or if you have done your own set of icons, you can email me and I can probably put them up here for you to share with others.

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Find an icon interesting but would like to modify it?

If you find an icon very nice, but you are not be able to draw it out or download it anywhere online, then probably you would like to turn the icon into an image; that’s right, the reversed way of what I have just tough you.

I am introducing a free software to you: IconGrabber.

Just like the name of the software describes, you can use it to grab the icons into images of .TIFF, .JPG, .GIF, . PNG and .BMP file formats. It’s super easy to use.

1. Install the software, you can download it from here (Click this link to download)
2. Run the program and choose the icon you would like to grab
3. Choose the size and file format you like.

Once you grab the image, you can modify it and reuse (probably you don’t want to punish it out to the public as icons are probably registered and hence you can only make it for personal use); or you can grab the image and do what ever you want.

My small tutorial on how to change icons (both parts) are now considered completed, if I have missed something, please let me know and I will correct them. Thanks a lot.