Icon-A-Day 2.0, Day 1. Not ready for the wrecking ball.

By mormegil on August 5, 2008 8:17:21 PM from

JoeUser Forums

mormegil

Stardock

Join Date 03/2001

+31

For those of you not familiar with the Icon-A-Day series of tutorials, and icons, you can find the Tutorial Index Here, and the final Iconpackage Here. I hope you will find the new series helpful and fun, and I hope you find the new icons to your liking. For those of you who were around for the first go, welcome back, and thank you all for making the Icon-A-Day series such a great success. The original Icon-A-Day Iconpackage has been downloaded 225,673 (as of today) times from Wincustomize alone, not to mention that the individual icons are up to 761,444 when you put them together. And thanks to you guys my Wincustomize Home Page has been in the top 5 blogs on Wincustomize for the last 3 years.

Like last time, I want to use the first day to let you know what the goal of the project will be, and how we will be going about it.

First off, despite the name "Icon-A-Day," I will often be posting multiple icons each day, and there will probably be days were I don't get a final icon posted. I do hope to get a post up each day, with at least a short tutorial, even if the resulting icon is not final. This is one reason why I will be naming each post with the day and a title, rather than the the icon # and name. And finally, I have had to admit that there is just not enough time in the day. Unlike last time, I will only be posting on the weekdays; Monday - Friday. I will also be skipping most holidays.

Icon-A-Day 2.0, will be Part 1 of a new series of icons. Part 1 will be going through the original Icon-A-Day icons and making them ready for the Vista World. Part 2, will be a brand-spanking-new icon set, one that is only a sparkle in my eye at the moment. So you can think of Part 1 more as Icon-A-Day 1.5.

I do these tutorials for my own pleasure, however I LOVE to get feedback; please comment and let me know what you like and don't like. I will be taking feedback seriously, and want to make sure that both the updated Icon-A-Day package and the new icon set are some of the best icons on the net.

Once again, I will be doing these icons, in CorelDRAW. I just recently updated to X4, and have been happy with it. For those of you who want to follow along, and don't have X4, you should be able to do so with any version newer than version 9, since I will be using a lot of Mesh Fills. You can also get the Trial Version from Corel here. If you find yourself loving it as much as I do, you can buy it at your local retailer, or even get it Directly from Impulse. (Stardock Plug). For those of you who don't care for vector graphics, or who love Illustrator, or Photoshop, you might find some interesting techniques that you can borrow, and might find the tutorials more useful than you think.

That's enough exposition for day one, lets move on the the reason we are here.

Day, 1 (Monday, August 4th, 2008)

As I mentioned above, part one of this new series will consist of updating the original Icon-A-Day icons. When I started the original icons in January of 2005, Vista was still called Longhorn, and was still a mythical OS that would do everything for everyone. Early screenshots were leaking out, most of which were not at all what we ended up with in Vista, but I did know that we were most likely going to end up with 256x256 icons. So even then I was pretty sure I would need to upsize the icons, and when I exported them I did so at 384x384. This has made it possible for me to quickly create Vista quality icons of the original images.

Even three years later I am still quite proud of the Icon-A-Day icons, and think that many of them only now, in Vista, can truly shine. So today, rather then jumping into creating any new icons, I will start going through all the existing icons and updating those that are not ready for the wrecking ball. Most of the icons that will need drastic updates will be the folders, since we will be rotating them so as to take advantage of Vista's Live Folder feature. We will also be creating many new folders to fit in better with the new user folder structure. I will however be updating many of the system and file icons, since some of them are obsolete, or just dated.

Today we will start with the System icons that I feel stand up to vista's 256x256 scrutiny. These can be divided up into two groups, icons that I think are still look great in Vista, and icons that look good, but are not often seen in Vista. I will be updating them despite this, because I want the final 2.0 pack to be as complete as possible.

Internet Icons:
I still love this globe, even if it is kind of simple, so we will be keeping it, as well as most of the Icons that are derived from it.

Drives:
The hard drive was one of the first icons in the Icon-A-day series, and I think that it stands up well. Even if it is technically an external. In 1.0 we also made several of the less common drive types. I think these all stand up to time, and I am sure we will have to add several more as we work our way through the 2.0 update.

Other System Icons:
I am still quite proud of this Recycle Bin, and I think people like it since I have seen it ripped more times than I can remember. The rest of these system files I don't really think need updating; some are just too basic, and some are only used in XP, or even 2000/98, so I will simply be making Vista versions for the fun of it.

System Icons that Will See Updates.
As much as I liked the My Computer icon for 1.0, it is a bit dated, and I want to give it some love. This will mean that many of the other system icons will be getting updated as well; My Network, Control Panel, etc. We will also be adding several new System, and Control Panel icons, as the project continues.

Wrap Up:
I think that is enough for Day One; I will back tomorrow, and we will get the File icons that are still in vogue updated. I will be posting the above icons into the Miscellaneous Icons category, all ready for Vista. I will be compiling all the icons with the complete complement of of size, from 16x16 to 256x256, so they should work with just about any system or application you want to use them on. Have fun!

Download Updated Icons:
Get today's Icons form the Miscellaneous Icons Library.

All Icon-A-Day artwork, copy, and Icons, are copyrighted by Paul Boyer © 2008, and may not be used with out express permission.