Can I easily create an icon with Xara? - or should I just give up?

[zaphodeist]

That's what I meant in my post

[amoore]

I make the icons for our software in XDP6 and then convert using Axialis (not free). Works find. AFAIK, it should work just as well using icofix.

Note that, as Gary said, 16x16 pixels isn't much to work with. I generally start with 48x48 or 32x32, then create a copy at 16x16 and export that as a png to import into the icon app.

[ad1066]

I would recommend setting the screen units to Pixels, and make sure that your lines/objects line up on whole pixels. It will make for far less headaches when reducing the resulting bitmap/png/whatever.

-- Ben

[haakoo]

Create box 160x160 pix
zoom in>create the image(use a minimum amount of colors/shapes)
zoom to 100% to see if it's great,if not,alter it
>Reduce the boxed image to 16x16 or 32x32 pix(whatever you want)
>export as gif
download xnView(freeware) http://www.xnview.com
open the gif in xnview>batch-convert save as .ico

done

Hans

[gwpriester]

Grace - If you want to do it manually, create a grid of 1 pixel squares, 16 squares by 16 squares.

Zoom in so the grid fits the screen. Then color each square.

Zoom out to 1:1 and you can see how it is going to look in real life.

Once you have done this you still need to convert to an ico file.

[wizard509]

You might try Irfanview to convert your final image into an icon. Oftentimes I find doing my design at 48x48 then exporting and using Irfanview to convert works better than IcoFX.

[zaphodeist]

Not to sure about this but I think the image has to be named favicon.ico

[PhilM]

Setting individual pixels is old hat and tedious. You don't need to do it!

My suggestion is to draw icons actual size and to use all of Xara's graphics tools; curves, grad fills, shadows, whatever. That way you are allowing the program to do the hard work of deciding what colours the pixels should be. The trick to producing a legible icon at small sizes is then to keep the image simple and to know where the pixels are so that you can align your major edges to whole pixels.

For example, if you draw a circle, make the top, bottom, left and right be on exact pixel boundaries and let the program worry about how best to set pixels to represent the curves.

* Set pixels as your page units
* Create a new layer, zoom in and draw a 16*16 grid of very thin lines, making sure it's accurate
* Make the new layer be visible but not editable (so it's an overlay to show you where the pixels are)
* Go back to the first layer, zoom in and draw

To see what the icon will look like, turn off the overlay layer and zoom to 100%.

Phil