The site was set up mainly for accounting users with the progress of development and guide for usage of Skinstudio and IconDeveloper. Brought to you by Adam Najmanowicz - the lead developer of SkinStudio & IconDeveloper.
Are there no limits to customization?
Published on November 14, 2004 By Adam Najmanowicz In IconPackager Tutorials
Very important: Recoloring or skinning icons does not change the original author's copyright, nor does it make such icons yours. If you recolor or skin an icon that has not been made by yourself you may not upload or share a recolored icon without the original author's permission.

In the next few days Stardock is publishing the next component of it's extremely successful ObjectDesktop. The new component is called IconDeveloper - the tool's , I'm the developer of, main purpose is to make it easy for casual users to create icons and make it faster and more efficient for professional icon artists to do their work. Celebrating the event I decided to write a short article about going really crazy with icons and how to do it with IconDeveloper. What skinning means (but is not limited to) is changing the look of certain part of applications. The article will describe how you can change the appearance of an IconPackager theme or an Icl file (Icon library).

So you recolored your icons already? (If not checkout the article about mix matching your themes with your skins - the functionality described there is now a part of IconDeveloper). But it still isn't enough? Why stop on recoloring? Why not make your icons exactly how you want them to be? Why not SKIN THE ICONS?

I have recolored according to my taste (or lack of it) the great Bant's "Ciela" Visual Style (Please do not ask for the recolored skin. Curtesy of Bant, it's available here for free and you can easilly recolor it with SkinStudio). It has a kind of toxic look now, which if you have seen the screenshots in some of my previous articles, you have probably noticed I've developed a taste for.

Since i can never get enough of the marvelous PixOs icons by Paul Boyer I have decided to recolor them to match the skin.



But since I've done the recoloring already, should I stop there? Let's open the modded "PixOs Toxic"...



Select a new name for skinned theme and specify that I want to actually "skin" it...



Now what can we do here... I know! Let's set it on fire!



Or make it suffer in a really polluted environment... sorry Paul



and actually make it ultimately match my skin of choice... and a bit smoked (Why? Why not?!). To do this I've had to edit an image from the Visual Style to create a bevel I can now use as a background (made for sake of this artticle only). You can actually use any image for either a background or overlay - just press the "Browse" button and select the image you want to use.



The possibilities are countless. IconDeveloper comes with a number of backgrounds and overlies for you to toy with, but the real potential is in your creativity. Make your own icon's skins. The sky is the limit!

Comments (Page 1)
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on Nov 15, 2003
since i'm new to this, i found it both interesting & insightful - but i did kinda figure recoloring didn't make it mine.
on Nov 15, 2003
Great article and application Adam! I've never really liked the standard icon editors, but this sweet... Thanks for taking the time to write a nice article on using it to give people an idea of what it can do.

CarpeThis
on Nov 15, 2003
Dear Wonderful Folks at Stardock,
I now officially hate you all.
Love,
kthxbye

And on a more serious note. Wow. IconDeveloper looks like it's going to be very kick-ass. I'll have to play around with the free version so I can cry.
on Nov 16, 2003
And how can I download Icon developer? This very need for me, help, give me a link.
on Nov 16, 2003
It's only part of Object Desktop presently which is $49.95 but comes with a ton of cool programs.
on Nov 17, 2003
Nice article, thank you for the tutorial. Could you please do one for creating icons for the explorer and IE toolbars that SkinStudio can replace?
on Jan 06, 2004
All images are gone ???
on Jan 13, 2004
yup, sorry, Images shoul;d be back up now.
on Dec 07, 2004
how do i create an icon package with my downloaded set of .png files?
on Dec 07, 2004
you can batch convert them to icons with Icon Developer.

The option is available at:
File->Batch processing->...

but then you need to create the package with Icon Packager.
on Dec 11, 2004
Cool!
on Dec 16, 2004
Very good article on some of the power, capabilities and features of icondeveloper! Nice!
on Dec 24, 2004
Very good! Thanks, thats really, really good! Merry Christmas to all too.
on Jan 05, 2005
je ne comprends rien !

i don't understand anythink !
on Jan 05, 2005
I would like install icons on my PC. Someone could be help me ?
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