There is an old adage "Don’t judge a book by its cover" however, the reality is that many people do judge on first impressions and this is certainly true of applications. It doesn’t matter how good your application is, the fact is that a significant percentage of potential users will be put off even trying an application if it doesn’t have a professional look to it. People will assume that if you haven’t taken any care with the packaging then you haven’t taken care of the application itself. One very prominent part of any application is its icon. Programs with the default windows executable icon just don’t look nice; they need to be replaced with a custom one.
1) Who is this for?
People who want to alter a file’s icon image without spending money to do so. This article is also focused on Windows and as such will not directly apply to other operating systems like Mac OS or Linux. The method described below is valid for any version of Windows between 98 and Vista.
2) Software you will need
One of the best programs to create Windows Icon Format files, IcoFX, is completely free and can be downloaded from http://icofx.en.softonic.com/. IcoFX doesn’t just covert image files into icon files it is also a reasonably well featured paint package which will allow you to create icons from scratch. If however you have access to something like Photoshop or are more used to using other packages then it is probably quickest to create the graphics there and then import them into ICOFX to be processed.
If you don’t have Photoshop then one of the best freely available paint packages/image manipulation programs is called Paint.NET which can be downloaded from http://www.getpaint.net/.
Finally you will need a program to take the icon file and apply it to your executable. Help with this comes in the form of Resource Hacker which can be downloaded from http://angusj.com/resourcehacker/. Ironically Resource Hacker is a program you shouldn’t judge by its packaging since it is a very barebones application.
3) Create the Graphics
Icon files include, or can include various different versions of the icon at different sizes and colour depths. These different sizes come into use depending on the DPI (Dots Per Inch) settings in Windows among other things. This however does not mean that you have to draw several versions of your icon. If you create the icon image at the largest size all the other versions can be created automatically from it in IcoFX. Therefore you should create your icon image at 256 by 256 pixels with a 24 bit colour depth. Icons can contain transparent and semitransparent areas so feel free to create an image with an 8bit alpha channel to make use of this feature.
4) Create the Windows Icon File
Once drawn, import the image into IcoFX and export it as a Windows Icon File (.ico). IcoFX makes this task very intuitive and self explanatory so describing the process here is unnecessary. It is Resource Hacker which will likely give you problems the first time you use it.
5) Apply the icon to an executable file.
The final step is to apply the icon file using Resource Hacker. To do this, go into Resource Hacker and select "File > open" then navigate to the .exe you want to apply the icon to and double click on it. You will be returned to the main menu and it will look like nothing has happened. It’s off putting but don’t worry the program is working correctly. Select "Action > Add new resource…" Now click on "Open file with new resource…" navigate to your required icon file and double click on it. Before you can continue you will have to fill in the fields "Resource Name" and "Resource Language" You can type in anything you like in these two fields but I usually write something descriptive about the image used for the icon in the "Resource Name" field, and for "Resource Language" I use "English". Now click "Add Resource" and to finish off click "File > Save". Well done, you have just created your own custom icon and applied it. Just to be on the safe side Resource Hacker creates a backup of the original file in case there has been a problem.
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