This post has been in the draft folder for too long. While travelling recently I read a post on another blog about IcoFX then remembered I'd never posted it!
As part of preparing our AutoCAD Architecture/MEP 2009 deployments I decided it was time to refresh the look of the standard cad desktop. We run customised AutoCAD Architecture which combines company specific settings with a New Zealand localisation package - Salesoft Pacifica. It has a custom icon to launch it as uses a special AutoCAD profile. Since I last updated them - back in 2006 - my company has re-branded, launched a new look website, and Autodesk have adopted the Big Letter icons. It was time for an update!
Our Intranet (called icRed - inspired by Split Enz?) shortcut just has the logo "stripes" so I used these in the new scheme.
The Intranet, Revit, Max & ADR icons are standard, the CAD Standard icons reflect the two formats it's available in (MindManager Map & Intranet hosted HTML) and there are customised ACA/AMEP icons which access our localised profiles.
The fun part with the ACA/AMEP icons was making something you could recognise in various forms without totally trashing the appearance of the original graphics. The lower left corner is out of bounds since it's sometimes covered by the shortcut arrow but totally changing the icon looses the link to the standard product. Those are still on the machine with local profiles for use when away from the network.
Making them is a snap with the brilliant IcoFX donor-ware software. You just create/import a 248x248 pixel image and edit it as you like. When you're happy go to Icon > Create icon from image and it generates the Windows Icon with all the variations of sizes and colour depths required. From there it pays to check out the lower resolution/depth images as they may benefit from a bit of sharpening up, but it's usually minor. IcoFX has image editing tools built in for creating icons from scratch if required.
IcoFX - http://icofx.ro/
IcoFX is an award winning freeware icon editor. It is an all-in-one solution for icon creation, extraction and editing. It is designed to work with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Macintosh icons supporting transparency. With a wealth of tools and more than 40 effects at your fingertips, there’s virtually no limit to the icons you can create. You can easily convert your favorite images into icons, or icons into images.
For MindManager use I export a Topic image and create a Topic icon to use in my library.
- Topic Icon: Unfortunately MindManager won't display standard windows icons as it doesn't like 256x256 "XP True Color + Alpha" images. This is simple to fix:
- Copy the icon to your MindManager Library Icon Folder.
- Open the icon with IcoFX and delete the 256x256 XP image .
- Topic Image: Open the icon with IcoFX and export an image for your MindManager Library Icon Folder. 64x64 pixels to best matches MindManager 7 standard images, 48x48 for MindManager 8.
Images exported from IcoFX can be used in MindManager map topics & notes while topic icons can also be used to filter MindManager map views.
