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Making Themes Contents Introduction In Short Tools Vector Drawing Image Editing Other Utilities Button States General Styles Main Controls Secondary Controls Playlist Controls Toolbar Icon List Releasing Credits Licenses |
Chapter 3. Tools
<- Return to In Short     Continue to Button States ->
This is just a quick bit of information about some tools to help with making icons. If you already use digital art tools, this really isn't that important. Vector Drawing
My favored method for creating icons is with vector drawing programs. Such programs use curves and shapes, rather than pixels, allowing the results to be scale to whatever size is desired. Also, they usually are better for working with gradients. Some vector drawing programs are Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand, and SodiPodi.
Image Editing
Image editing tools aren't really designed for drawing icons. You can draw with them, but you end up doing a lot of pixel-by-pixel editing. I would recommend having one to go over images, as they can come in handy.
For this, I have only greatly used The GIMP, Adobe Photoshop, and PaintShop Pro. As you only need to edit icons, any are adequate, but I would recommend Photoshop or The GIMP. Other Utilities
There are a lot of other programs out there which can be used, but I am mostly just recommending against them. You could use a lot of less powerful image editors, but they tend to make really bad images if they ever scale pictures or try to do blending. On a similar note, I would avoid using ImageMagick heavily. Although it may be just my inability to learn how to use it, I have found that it has very bad algorithms. Its scaling always looks worse than scaling I do in The GIMP, and it also makes very messy conversions to and from some file formats, such as XPM. <- Return to In Short     Continue to Button States ->
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