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The best way to create an application icon

What is the best way to create an icon for an application?

From Visual Studio or possibly another program.

I create an icon in Visual Studio and use it as an application icon, but when I put a shortcut on the desktop, there is only a gray icon. Perhaps this is due to the size of the icons or something else?

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c # winforms icons createfile
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7 answers

You just can't beat IcoFX for price and feature set.
This is one of my favorite programs, and it makes icon design incredibly easy. If you use MS Paint or the icon editor built into Visual Studio, you must do it yourself to download IcoFX and try it.

Adobe Photoshop is a 300-pound gorilla, but I think everyone who knows (or wants to learn) how to use Photoshop already knows this.

But in fact, maybe we, the developers, are deceiving ourselves, thinking that we are icon painters. In addition to several specialized cases where you cannot find the icon that you need, you are obligated to your users to use the existing icon library . Seriously, even with the best tools, could you design these ? I didn’t think so.

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The best image programs are Adobe products. However, Paint.NET is a good free tool (see Create .ico Files with Paint.NET ).

On the project properties application tab, in the Resources group, add the icon file to the Icon and Manifest sections.

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If you do not have artistic skills, you should look at Iconfu . You can simply select the base icon and apply custom styles and colors to the style.

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Here at our office, my employee uses the Microangelo Icon Editor . He is a screen designer, so I guess he knows what he is doing.

As a programmer, I would never dare to create icons on my own. I do not have graphic skills. I usually rely on third-party libraries such as Icon Experience .

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See Make an ICO file in 30 seconds (YouTube video) and http://converticon.com/ .

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If you enjoy using Photoshop, there are many free icon export tools available that I personally use.

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I also created some good ones with AWIcons Pro , which has a free trial.

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