HeySage

In this episode I will show you how to create custom icons for files, folders, applications or whatever you would like within OS X (difficulty = hard).

You may watch the this episode here or download it via iTunes

In the screencast I use a number of applications. Although I use two applications that are not free (illustrator and photoshop) this process can be done by using all freeware applications. You may use any image creation and/or manipulation application but you will need:

1. Icon Composer (a component of the apple developer tools which comes with you installation disc) and
2. Icns2Rsrc

Here we Go!

Photoshop Steps

1. Open a new document with the dimensions of 128X128. Create your image within that document. You must make sure that you are in an 8 bit RGB color space so that you can save your image as a CompuServe Gif.
2. Hit ⌘⇧S (File –> Save As) and select compuserve GIF from the drop down dialog box for format. Choose an appropriate name for you file and then click Save.
3. Click OK in the indexed Color dialog box and make sure that the Transparency box is checked (Transparency is not necessary but it sure does look a lot better!).
4. From the GIF Options dialog box, select normal.

Icon Composer (Macintosh HD/Developer/Applications/Utilities/Icon Composer)

1. Open Icon Composer
2. Drag and drop the GIF file that you just created into each of the boxes in the image composer.
3. For the lower resolution icon versions you will get an alert asking if you would like to use a scaled down version. Select the Use Scaled Version button.

4. This warning will be followed by another warning asking if you would like to extract the mask. If you want your transparency preserved choose extract Mask.

   It is worth noting that you could create different versions of your image for each of the Icon sizes and drag those into the Icon Composer. This works fine, the only downside is that it is more time consuming.

5. Choose File–>Save and choose an appropriate name and click Save.

Icns2Rsrc

1. Hit ⌘O or File Open
2. Navigate to the icns file that you just created via Icon Composer and click Open
3. In the Enregistrer Sous: dialog box Choose a name and a location to save your file to.

Finder

1. Choose the application, file, folder or whatever you would like to change the icon of and get Info. You can do this by clicking on the icon to highlight it and then hitting ⌘I. Select the .rsrc file that you just created and get info on that.
2. In the Get info dialog box for the rsrc file, select the icon in the top left corner. It will have a blue highlight once selected. Key ⌘C to copy the icon.
3. Go to the info pane for the file or folder that you would like to change the icon for and select the icon in the top left corner and hit ⌘V (paste).

That’s it. You are done!

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