November 24, 2004

Creating XP icons that work with VB

Things you will need:

  1. Illustrator or Freehand
  2. Photoshop
  3. Gamani GIF Movie Gear
  4. MSDN cheat sheet

Things you hopefully won't need:

Providing a proper VB Application Icon, Including Large Icons and 32-Bit Alpha Images


Its pretty simple once you've done it once.
  1. Build your icons for 48px, 32px and 16px.
  2. Take them into photoshop if they are not there already.
  3. Create a layered file with the three sizes in 32-bit color
  4. Save each size as a new file and covert it to index (256) color. This makes the 8-bit versions.
  5. Save each size as a new file with index (16) colors. This makes the 4-bit versions.
  6. Import the layered psd file plus the 6 other files into GIF Movie Gear.
  7. Crop the frames of the imported layered file to the correct size.
  8. Save as an icon.

In order to use the icon file in VB it must have an 8-bit version.

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