[thelist] any favicon artists out there?

Andrew Clover and-evolt at doxdesk.com
Wed Jul 17 12:24:00 CDT 2002


Tim Luoma wrote:

> (having realized, using Moz, that I was the last one without it).

Not really.

I never used to bother with shortcut icons as IE has (had? has it been
fixed?) the annoying habit of expiring them from the cache, turning any
bookmark with a custom icon into an ugly 'unknown file' icon after a
few months.

Now Mozilla and Konqueror use it (and use it without having to use a bookmark)
it probably makes a bit more sense.

> The domain name is "tntluoma.com" so I was thinking a "TnT" would be
> appropriate.

If you don't mind a bloody terrible visual pun, you could try this I
just monkeyed up:

  http://and.doxdesk.com/file/temp/tnt.png

(This is a PNG with alpha transparency since I don't have an ICO-saving
app on hand ATM. IE/Win won't display the alpha right.)

Source is here:

  http://and.doxdesk.com/file/temp/tnt.xar

Like Stef, I prefer to work in a higher resolution and scale down, but I
go the whole hog and use a vector graphics app. That's because:

  a. it makes producing other scaled versions trivial. You can include
     32x32 icons for someone who drags the address to the desktop, or
     even those chunkylarge WinXP versions.
  b. it's much easier to make changes to vector work than bitmaps
  c. but most importantly: I've never met a bitmap editor that's any
     good for icons under Windows. Lots of apps for photo-retouching,
     nowt that's any use for pixel-by-pixel screen work. Anyone?

The issue with scaling down is that you ought to make sure than you're
putting your horizontal and vertical lines on pixel boundaries, or you'll
likely just get a mush when you resample. This is easy to do in my
vector graphics app of choice, Xara X (www.xara.com): just set the grid
to 1 pixel.

(Xara has loads of other helpful features for doing pixel-based work; I
use it for pretty much all my web graphics.)

--
Andrew Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://and.doxdesk.com/



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