Apr 23, 2010

15 Insanely Awesome Toolkits for Icon Designers

Icon is a visual anchor which helps us to navigate through the interface. Icon design is the process of designing a graphic symbol that represents some real, fantasy or abstract motive, entity or action. Icon designs may be of many designs and can be simple with 2d drawing or a black silhouette, or complex presenting a combination of graphics design elements such as one or more linear and radial color gradients, projected shadows, contour shades, and 3D perspective effects. If you want to create effective icon designs, then you should take a holistic approach to issues such as audience, size, simplicity, lighting, perspective, and style. Here we bring you a good opportunity and a good starting place for making icons that using these below toolkits will work together with you and fits within your budget.

1.Adobe creative suite


Adobe CS5 is most important tool for icon designers. It might seem prohibitively expensive, but it includes a lot for your money. For icon designers, CS5’s most useful tools include Photoshop, the market leading piece of image editing, manipulation and compression software; Illustrator, an artwork program used throughout the creative industries; and Fireworks, which lets you allow to  optimize images for the web.

2.Axialis icon workshop


Axialis Icon Workshop6.5 is a highly compatible piece for your  icon creation priced at $49.95, conversion and editing software available for Mac, Windows and Unix OS too. Besides the standard features you would expect, IconWorkshop is the only icon editor which lets you create and edit Image Strips for toolbars. The new generation of icons uses variable transparency (alpha channel). This feature permits creating beautiful icons with smooth borders and shadows. Axialis IconWorkshop also simplifies the icon creation process by providing you with a vast array of basic image objects, You can drag and drop on top of one another for professional looking results and it’s compatible with graphic industry standards.

3.Awicons


AWicons Pro has both home and business editions. The latest version offers advanced graphics processing mechanisms rarely found even in leading photo editing applications – everything from high-detail true color alpha-blended icons support to advanced drawing modifiers, such as anti-aliasing, multi-color gradient and transparency is included.User-friendly and an interactive interface, multiple tutorials and sample icon libraries included in the software package AWicons is easy to learn and use even for someone who have never tried creating graphics before.Business edition for $59.95 and Home edition for $39.95.

4.Icon developer


Easy to create your own Windows icons using icon developer. IconDeveloper allows users to just import images made by other programs and turn them quickly and easily into icons. It  also makes it easy to change the colors of icons, batch conversions, and  variety of scaling techniques to ensure the highest possible quality.This beautiful product has a reasonable price is $19.95.

5.Icon builder


Icon builder is available for both Mac ($79) and Windows ($49), IconBuilder works compatible with Adobe Photoshop and Fireworks to make creating icons easy. Some main features are
  • Create icons of any size
  • Create icons of any shape
  • Save all icon resources as one Photoshop layer
  • Import existing icons
  • View icons against various background colors

6.Icon machine


Icon Machine is a $25 shareware icon editor available for Mac users only (Mac OS X 10.2 or later). It contains various tools that make it possible for you to produce rich, attractive icons in a range of colors and sizes. You can import icons that you’ve created in Photoshop, and edit them using the machine. Drag and drop functionality is there, as well as the Edit Icon plugin, which lets you open files in Icon Machine from the Finder, make this tool a pleasure to use.

7.Icon Packager


You can change all of the icons on a computer’s desktop at the touch of a button with Icon packager. Use IconPackager to transform hundreds of icons at once. There are tons of icon packages available for you to use, so you’re bound to find one that’s perfect for the project at hand. IconPackager also allows users browsing through their system to right-click on any file and go to the added “Icon” tab and change the icon.You can trial the software for free, or buy it for just $9.95.

8.Icon Cool


IconCool Studio is a complete solution for 32 bit icon editing and creation. The program includes all standard image editing tools, as well as a variety of filters and effects that can be used to enhance your icon designs. In addition to icon and (animated) cursor formats, the program also supports editing of GIF, JPG and PNG image files. Other features included
  • Support for latest Vista icons
  • Photoshop plug-in and transfer
  • Multi-format import/export and more
  • Powerful marquee operation is available
  • Flexible gradient editing
  • Powerful color management
  • Friendly user interface
Pricing only $39.95/$49.95(PRO)

9.Icofx


Award winning freeware icon editor.Better solution for icon creation, extraction and editing. It is designed to work with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and MacOS icons supporting transparency.No limits to create your icons. You can easily convert your favorite images into icons, or icons into images. Possible to create icon libraries. You can easily work with multiple files using the batch processing capability of IcoFX,Multiple language support features,Multiple undo is possible,For more features please view this http://icofx.ro/features.html

10.Microangelo


Available for Windows only, is a family of icon software comprising On Display ($24.95), Toolset ($49.95) and Creation ($59.95). You can buy the whole package for $79.95, saving $55. On Display lets you right click on and change any icon, wherever it is on your computer. Tool set includes an icon editor, icon manager, icon explorer and animated cursor editor. Creation lets you make icons and cursors that look stunning in Windows XP, using a similar set of tools to Photoshop, with layers, gradients and a fully customizable color palette.Each package has special features.

11.Greenfish


Powerful icon program and its completely free, cursor, animation and icon library editor.Professional and unique freeware tool for designing small pixel graphic images. Greenfish offers high-quality filters like Bevel, Drop Shadow and Glow; supports editing animated cursors and managing icon libraries. It’s lightweight (< 1.8 MB unzipped) and also has a portable version – A clean, customizable, multilingual user interface makes it really easy to learn and use.

12.SIB


User-friendly icon utility for Windows. It allows to create and edit icon images and manage icon files and libraries.You can edit PNG packed windows vista icons,Create and manage icon libraries and Convert MAC icons in to windows format and much more features.You can buy it for $29.95

13.Liquid icons


Free and most popular Icon Editors in the world. (no Adware, Spyware, Guaranteed), portable and lightweight, and works on every version of Windows. Some of the important features are  Integrated icon browser for easy icon extraction,image manipulation functions,Set of image effects that will help you in your icon creation and Standard set of image editing tools.

14.Icon maker


Easy Icon Maker is a small and easy icon utility for icon making, editing, changing, extracting, searching, and exploring.It allows you editing a transparent or opaque icon. You may edit your own professional icons easily and quickly with the built-in editor, Extract an icon from an EXE or DLL file.,You may import graphic file such as BMP, JPG or GIF and save it into icon file or export icon file to graphic file.Available price is $29.95 .

15.Iconographer


Mscape Software is no longer supporting Iconographer, but you can still download this piece of software and use it for free, ideal for those of us not so willing to splash the cash! With Iconographer, available for Mac only, you can create and customize your own folder icons.
Which software is your favorite for designing Icons? Don’t forget to share.:)

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.