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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

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.
If you just want a once-over of the section, I recommend you get SodiPodi and The GIMP.


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.
If you are paying for an expensive program and using either MacOS or Windows, I would definitely recommend Adobe Illustrator. I have always found it to be superior to Freehand.
SodiPodi is a free, open source program. I would recommend it, as it can be used under Linux and won't cost you a finger and a toe. However, SodiPodi has some significant drawbacks. I would, in fact, say it is clearly worse than Illustrator. Of course, as I write this I only have SodiPodi 0.32, and it is excellent for how early it is in production. However, the technical limitations can be irritating. For example, SodiPodi cannot (currently) export to files less than 16x16 pixels in size, and the active-item icon needs to be 12 pixels tall to fit reliably with the text in the playlist. Also, SodiPodi cannot yet make multi-point gradients. These are, however, minor drawbacks, and it is still my primary tool for art under Linux.


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.
Photoshop is clearly the best, in my mind. It has a better interface and more power than anything else, and is particularly nice if you are using Illustrator as well. However, it costs about 700 dollars.
The GIMP is very powerful, but not on par with Photoshop. In particular, however, it does not have an easy to learn interface. However, it is free and reliable. As such, I would recommend downloading a copy of it, unless you already have Photoshop.
Lighter programs, such as Paintshop Pro are very good if you do not intend to do much digital art. They have a low learning curve, and are usually adequate for the job. If you aren't willing to spend a day or two just trying to learn how to use a program, you might not want to use 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.
However, it does have a little value. When you get to the Releasing section of this guide, you will see that I use the Montage tool to make samples of my icon sets. ImageMagick is only particularly useful if you need to automate a task across a few hundred images, which you should be able to avoid.


 
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