

Now, we need to export ten PNG versions of this image, each with its own size and name. Once you have your icon looking the way you want it, go ahead and save the file. It’s actually an interesting read no matter what (at least if you’re interested in icons and such). If you’re creating an application icon, I highly recommend following Apple’s OS X Human Interface Guidelines when creating your icons. This image will now have the same size and transparency as the original, and can now be loaded into its own layer in any graphics editing program that supports them (which should be most of them). Export the image as a PNG with an Alpha channel.Hit Command-N to create a new image with the contents of your clipboard (i.e., your reference icon).Open up Preview (it’s in your Applications folder).Click on the icon itself so that it’s highlighted.


For this tutorial, I’m going to use Adobe Illustrator to create a real simple circular icon with the Rocket Yard logo inside, mostly because I had the graphic files laying around from another project, so it was quick to put together. Use your favorite image editor (Photoshop, Illustrator, GIMP… whatever you like) to create a 1024×1024 pixel document with a transparent background and draw/paint/assemble your icon. So let’s get started! Create your base image. Then you have all you need to make your own custom desktop icons.
#Macos folder icon maker mac#
What differentiates them from Windows' ICO files is that ICNS files can contain individual icon resources, thus acting more like a container file.Īdobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, the GIMP, GraphicConverter, Helicon Filter, ImageMagick, Inkscape, IrfanView, Pixel image editor, Paint.NET, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer.I’ve been making my own Mac icons for folders, applications, and a myriad of other uses for well over 20 years now. In addition, the ICNS file supports 1-bit as well as 8-bit alpha channels. This format is pretty handy as a base for the ICNS since it allows transparency. The content of the ICNS file typically consists of one or more images in the PNG format. However, PNG was designed for transferring images on the Internet, not for professional-quality print graphics, and therefore does not support non-RGB color spaces such as CMYK.

PNG supports palette-based images (with palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors), grayscale images (with or without alpha channel), and full-color non-palette-based RGB images (with or without alpha channel). As of OS X Mountain Lion, ICNS files can support even bigger images, namely the 1024x1024 pixels dimension. They range from 16x16 pixels to 512x512 pixels. ICNS files support images in a variety of dimensions. These icon files display a small image (icon) in the OSX Finder or dock, a representative for an application to which it is linked. Icon files used on Mac computers and other OS X devices use the file extension ICNS. However, PNG itself does not support animation at all. PNG was created as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) and is the most used lossless image compression format on the Internet.
#Macos folder icon maker portable#
Portable Network Graphics (PNG) is a raster graphics file format that supports lossless data compression.
