what program to make cool little icons?

[apple4life]

I was wondering if anyone knows how to make icons, not neccassarily application icons, but the ones you see on web sites? Like the 'a small orange' little orange. Yahoo even has cool little icons for their "mail," "my yahoo," etc. Alot of the shareware sites have them too. Those icons are real mac like and I was wondering how you make them and in what program. I'm going to be making a web page soon and would love to make some icons for buttons etc.

 

[munkle]

Photoshop and IconBuilder, is a good combo. However, Photoshop has a pretty steep learning curve but there are plenty of good books/web tutorials out there to get you started.

 

[decksnap]

If you want to know how to make 'cool' icons, you kinda gotta know how to make cool designs in general. The apps only provide the tools- you still need the skills. My avatar was built in Fireworks and Illustrator, which is a great combo for such things. Photoshop is also a good choice, but Fireworks is more directly streamlined toward what you're trying to accomplish.

 

[Simon Liquid]

I am, at best, a rank amateur when it comes to making icons, but I do like to mess around with them once in a while, say if I see a picture online that I want my hard drive to look like. I cut things up and put them together using the GIMP. Just using the pictures I make in GIMP doesn't work so well. For example, parts that are supposed to be transparent show up as black. So, I toss them on this little program called Pic2Icon which makes a properly formatted icon you can paste on various things. It might not be as good as Photoshop with an additional $70 plugin, but it's free.

 

[neoelectronaut]

Whenever I make my icons I make them in Photoshop, then plunk them into Pic2Icon, and it does the work for me.

I made the Mac icons here.