Mike Milo’s Journal

I don’t know if I’m the only one who wants to do this but from time to time I want a custom icon for either a program or a folder I have on my computer.

For instance, I am part of the beta team for Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro but the icon for the beta and the most recent version you can buy are exactly the same and it’s hard to tell them apart on my Dock on the Mac and my Quick launch on the PC, so I set out to create a new one for the program. In my case all I did was find a photo of the original icon and tweak with the Hue/Saturation tool in Photoshop but read on and you will see there are other things you can do such as create your own icons with your computer!

Changing an icon on a Mac is pretty easy…

1. right click on the icon you want to change and the icon (or picture) you want to use and then select “Get Info” from the pull down menu (Fig-1).
2. A window will come up giving you options about that particular icon.
   

   Fig-1

3. Click the top icon (Fig-2)
4. Select Edit>Copy from the File menu.
5. Then navigate to the icon you want to change, and redo steps 2 and 3.
6. Select Edit>Paste from the File menu.
7. Viola’! Pat yourself on the back because you’ve just changed your icon!

Fig-2

Clever, clever you! :-)

Now for the PC it’s a bit more involved but nothing too complicated.

1. Right Click on the folder or program icon you would like to change and select “Properties” from the pull down menu (Fig-3).
2. A window will come up and you should select the “Customize” tab (Fig-4).
3. From there Select “Change Icon” (Fig-5) and navigate to the new icon you would like to replace the old one with.  There are many places on the web to download free replacement icons for the PC.  Here’s one site that gives many links to icon sites.

Fig-3

Fig-4

Fig-5

What’s that you say? You want to express yourself and create a brand new icon or turn a picture into an icon? Well if you have Photoshop it’s pretty easy. There is a free plugin you can download from Telegraphics which will allow you to open and save out in Window’s .ico format!If you use it regularly I suggest you give hima a donation through Paypal to thank him.

What’s that? You wan tto create your own icon? Oooh you’re tricky! Okay well you can do that pretty easily as well, especially on a PC.

Falco Icon Studio works well and will let you edit and create icons for your PC.

For the Mac, you can use Iconographer

So there you have it! What will people say when they see all those spiffy custom icons you’ve created for yourself?

They will marvel at your greatness of course! :-)