XP icon practice
Refer to this site reprinted Microsoft MSDN article "Create a Windowsxp icon"
Here, I personally practice a few hours, take the process, and maybe some details ignore the past, please forgive me.
The birth of WindowsXP introduced a 32-bit icon mechanism, which consists of 24 real color bitmaps and 8-bit Alpha channels, so we see that he is naturally displayed on the background. Plus Microsoft uses a united style vector diagram to do a decision, the transfer of bitmap icon is unified, the style is novel, which is the only place that Microsoft has developed so long. It can be compared with MacOS.
Ok, don't talk about gossip, first introduce the tools used in it:
1, vector graphics drawing tool Adobe Illustrator 10
2, Picture Processing Tool Adobe Photoshop 7
3, icon generating tool: iconbuilderxp (Photoshop plugin), Iconworkshop5.0
First of all: Illustrator, Freehand and Coreldraw are quite excellent vector drawing tools, but we have a compatible with Photoshop, and we have chosen Illustrator, (BTW: Its gradient mesh function is too absolute). Photoshop is of course a top image processing tool, iConbuilderxp is a triplicate plugin, which is designed to convert the layer into icons. IConbuliderxp is the top-level tool of the icon, and the Mac / WinXP platform first creates software, but generates different size icon operations a bit cumbersome, so it uses another cool iConworkshop, which is fully supported by Windows XP icon format. Iconworkshop did not find the most important magic rod function, it was really uncomfortable (I don't know if I was stupid, but he didn't implement this function).
The steps are described below:
Since I have a good job, I will take a QQ icon:
0, of course, you should think about it before you draw, including sketching.
1. Use Illustrator to draw a draw vector graphic:
2, open Photoshop Prepare Image Processing:
3, the graphics in Illustrator is selected, copy to the paste board, paste into Photoshop, will prompt the paste, choose the point array
4, this is the newly built picture appears on the adjustable paste, determines the size of the size.
5, create a new icon bitmap, set the size of the big icon 48 × 48 o'clock
6. Put the QQ bitmap to the background to zoom in to the icon bitmap, set the shadow, pay attention to the parameters given by Microsoft
7, I think the shadow is merged in the layer, pay attention to keep the background transparency
8, use the iconbuilder filter, generate 48 × 48 ICON files, pay attention to the software directly to convert shadows into alpha elements, extreme cool
9. Open the icon editing with IconWorkshop, automatically create icons of various types of variety of colors, saved together, meet the different needs of the display.
10, big work, the following is the style of different icons seen in the folder
11, icon border on the desktop is natural, it is the best
Follow these steps, I believe that you can get your favorite icons. Note that icon looks better not to represent Goodui, a set of unified style plans is more important. An icon is not difficult to paint, it is difficult to draw a set of unified icons. Thank you for your interest in goodui.com Goodui with your excellent software.
Goodui.com 2002.9.28 early morning
