[Peter]

I was wondering about icons for Adium and had some ideas as to what would be cool.
Where the heck do you start when making an icon? I know Adam Betts and Mindfad makes lots of icons -- any clues?

[imitchellg5]

Photoshop, Illustrator, a piece of paper.

[kick52]

you can make nice circular ones with flash

[production_coordinator]

Step One) Save up some money.
Step Two) Call Adam Betts http://www.artofadambetts.com/weblog/


But seriously... this guy was the master... until Apple swooped him up. Now I don't even hear about anything he's working on.
http://www.mikematas.com/

[tooki]

1. come up with an idea. Apple's Human Interface Guidelines have good rules of thumb.
2. Design the 16x16px version in a bitmap editor.
3. Scale up the icon to the next step (32, 48, 64, 128px) and fill in the detail. Repeat until each resolution is complete. At 32px and larger, it can be possible to design in a vector app and then rasterize, but keep the detail level low to begin with, and then add detail for each bigger size.

tooki

[demograph68]

This should get you started.

[Salty]

512/512 photoshop file And a lot of boredom.