Here is a small third-party library that I used to draw icons on various things. This is pretty nice. For example, changing the color of the icon in accordance with my design was trivial.
Once you bring this class to your project and include it in your controller, you:
CustomBadge *customBadge1 = [CustomBadge customBadgeWithString:@"Badge 1"];
... customBadge1 , .