Icons: How does a developer with no design skill make his/her application icons look pretty? [closed]

Answer 1

I ended up getting $20 credits (min amount) from vectorstock - they have a lot of vector images, icons and stuff like that to choose from, selling for 1 credit (1$).

Answer 2

These are the icon links I found some time ago, I think they were not posted yet:

• Eyecandy for your KDE-Desktop

• +3700 Free icons for your website or blog

• Icons for people who need icons

• Tango Icon Library

this also sounds interesting: OpenClipArt but their web does not seem to offer quick previews (thumbnails)

Answer 3

I recommend IconFactory, too. Or to be exact: http://stockicons.com/ There are a lot of icon sets for an affordable price and I think buying a professional set is the best choice you have if you're not a graphics designer yourself.

If you only need a single icon, it's probably worth to hire a graphics designer.

Answer 4

I have a couple that I really like:

GlyFx and Liquidicity Vector Icons.

Those from Liquidicity are specially useful for WPF or Silverlight, you can make an interface that even zoomed looks great.

Answer 5

Cheat and use photo's!

I've struggle with this, What I tend to do now, is find photos of objects BUT on a plain white background. The background can be made transparent. I then use this Conversion tool to convert a PNG file into an .ico. When exporting include all resolutions up to 512 pixel size for good results.

Answer 6

If you have money, definitely go with a professional designer. At first if you don't have too many projects requiring a designer, just hire one on a contract basis. If you start feeling the need for a full-time designer then it's going to be beneficial to hire one.

Good looking free icon sets are available, but you should shop around for a decent icon set which you can reuse for most of your projects.

Finally, if you don't have access to a designer, just keep the look very clean and simple, because chances are that you can't do a good looking design (since you're not an artist).