[thelist] Free site icons?

Stuart Young syoung at unitec.ac.nz
Wed May 26 00:41:16 CDT 2004


jjk wrote:
> Is there a repository somewhere of freely-usable site icons? 
> I'm looking for a "print" icon (as in "format this page for
printing") 
> Where do people find these things?

Personally, I just make my own using the normal symbol fonts that come
with your OS or image editing software.
There are lots of good icons in the Webdings and Wingdings fonts for
example. I can only see a couple of poor printer icons (6 and 7 in
Wingdings 2) but you may have different symbol fonts on your machine. 

<tip type="Creating site icons using symbol fonts" author="Stuart
Young">
1. Open up image editing software and start creating some text in a new
image.
2. Type the entire keyboard into the text editor. Remember all the
capital letters and Shift-characters. Or store this in a text file and
copy and paste, e.g.
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ`1234567890-=[]\;',./~!@#$%^&*()_+{}|:"<>?
3. Make sure that the font size is big enough to read easily, but not
so big that it completely fills the text dialog box (or image).
4. Select all the text and change the font family to each of the symbol
fonts you have available in turn, checking to see if the icon you want
is in that symbol font. There are lots of good icons, in the Webdings
and Wingdings fonts for example, including phone, mail, mouse, info,
folder, page, speech bubble, megaphone, audio, play, fwd, etc, etc. You
can print out these font samples for later reference.
5. Once you have found the icon you want, delete all the rest of the
text so that only the icon remains.
6. Utilise that in an image design (e.g. change colours, size,
background, text effects, background effects etc, crop image to desired
size) Depending on the image editing software you have, you may have to
rasterise the text into a bitmap at some stage, or may have to create
the image at a large font size and then resize the whole image (as
opposed to making the image at a small pixel size with a tiny font
size).
</tip>

cheers

Dr Stuart Young,       +64 (0)9-815 4321 Ex 8656
<syoung at unitec.ac.nz>     
Lecturer, School of Computing and Information Technology,
Unitec New Zealand, Auckland, New Zealand
http://hyperdisc.unitec.ac.nz/staff/syoung.htm
I would provide a URL for my official staffpage, but its too long and
complex


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