OSX Leopard Icons

One very small upgrade to Leopard (but one that has not gone unnoticed by this designer), is the ability to use larger icons. OSX Leopard now uses icons that can be up to 512px big. This update is especially important now that coverflow browsing plays a big role in day to day operations. Coverflow shows icons and photos of any and every file residing in a specified folder. Having icons that span up to 512px large makes for much clearer images and a greatly improved GUI. I have been wanting to design my own icons for sometime, but never have taken the time to learn the process from start to finish. Well tonight I did!

Using the tutorial provided at TutorialDog.com I was able to successfully craft my own Leopard-compatible icons. I did however tweak the tutorial a bit. Instead of using CandyBar, I used the free program icns2icon to implament my finished product. The only other programs you need are photoshop and program called IconComposer which is included as part of Apple's Xcode package (this should be on your OS disc or is available for free download at the hyperlink provided).

I also discovered MAC's official human interface guidebook for designing all sorts of add-ons for OSX. It's a great read and really shows you why OSX just looks and feels superior to other operating systems on the market. Apple has set a benchmark in the aesthetics department which is huge to their product line. They've discovered that form indeed plays as equal a role as function in the marketing process. What's more, the MAC community has rallied around the good looks of the OS and has made qualified attempts at maintaining certain standards in the design and feel of their products/projects. Very cool.

I created icons tonight for myself and my wife to use on our separate document folders. In keeping with the MAC style guide, I gave them an apple-esque bubble flair. There is actually quite a bit of thought that goes into designing icons and logos like this. If anyone has any questions regarding the process I used for this, please feel free to post. I hit a couple snags when I was working on this, but was able to get through it fairly quickly.