Finder Productivity: Custom Icons Aren’t Just For Fun
Posted by Chuck on March 28th, 2006
In our last Finder article we looked at some tips for customizing your Desktop pattern and the Dock to help increase you’re productivity. This time we’ll show you how and why custom are the next step in turning the Finder into a true Weapon of Mac Production.
Custom Icons – Not Just Pretty Pictures
One of the most striking things about Mac OS X are the icons. Eye candy, to be sure, but should the production-minded care? You bet!
(For this article’s examples we’ll use icons from the “Aqua Candy Two” collection, downloaded from artist Susumu Yoshida’s web site.)
There are some good reasons Apple put so much effort into the design of these little 128 x 128 pixel works of art. Custom icons are an easy way to create visual cues for special project folders, documents, drives or whatever. They make it simple to pick a particular item out of a crowded window, identify it in the Dock or differentiate it in the Sidebar.
Here’s the right side of the Dock without custom icons used. Sure, the names are visible when you hover over the folder, but wouldn’t it be better to be able to identify which is which at a glance?
Finding Custom Icons
If you want to use a custom icon for these productive purposes, the process is quite easy. First, get a custom icon that suits your needs. Yes, you can create your own, but you’re busy right? Just Google “Mac OS X icons” and you’ll be provided with the latest and greatest.
A quick note about selecting what to use: many icon authors take great pains to create entire sets to replace Apple’s creations. There are even utilities that help automate the process of replacing the entire default set. I find this counter-productive since it requires that you re-learn the look of your production environment, especially if you change those sets frequently. There is also the issue of the compatibility of those utilities as the OS is updated. For the truly productive, all that spells “waste of time.” Stick with Apple’s stock system icons and use the custom icons only when they make sense.
Just because an icon author designates an icon as a replacement for something doesn’t mean that’s how you have to use it. What is important is that you know what it represents. Whether you pick something that is supposed to look like something already in the OS (the “Smart” icon that is supposed to represent a smart folder below) or something totally abstract (like a folder with flames coming out the top), be sure that it makes sense to you.
Getting It Done
Once you find one you like you are ready to assign it to an existing item (folder, document, etc). Simply select the custom icon in the finder and then choose “Get Info” from the File menu in the Finder. The resulting dialog will look like the image on the left. Click once on the icon in the dialog box in the top left corner to select it (the icon shown is highlighted; you can tell by the slight “glow” around the icon as shown on the right), and then select “Copy” from the Edit menu.
 The “Get Info” Dialog |
 The “Get Info” Dialog with the icon selected |
Rolling Your Own – The Easy Way
Once you start understanding how handy custom icons are and how easy they are to assign, you will want to use them frequently. Sooner or later you will find it would be helpful to have an icon of your own design. You can spend a substantial amount of time creating something that takes advantage of all the aspects of icon design (masks, transparency, etc.), but that takes time and time is money. When you need something quick and dirty, open the graphic file you want to use in Preview and either click and drag on the image to select the portion you want to use, or use the “Select All” option under the Edit menu (if it is available). Once you have what you want, choose File -> Copy to place it on the Clipboard, then open the target item’s Get Info dialog and paste the icon in as described above. Voila! OS X has automatically resized the selection down to the 128 x 128 pixel format. Your target item now has your brand new custom icon.
Not quite satisfied with how it looks? Go back and resize the graphic selection and repeat the process until you’re happy with the result. (Hint: It seems obvious, but the closer you can get to 128 x 128 in your original selection, the better the result is going to look.)
The downside to this is that the resulting icon has a white box around it, since you haven’t gone to all the trouble of creating the resource the “right” way. Here’s how my custom MacProductivity folder icon, created in this fashion, looks in the Dock:
Rolling Your Own – The Hard(er) Way
The easy approach is fine for your personal production environment, but if you are going to distribute a file or application with a custom icon, you want it done right. The mechanics of this are beyond the scope of this article, but there are two ways you can go. You can either hire a graphic designer to do the work for you or learn how to do it yourself. A good place to start the latter is Creating Photorealistic Icons for Mac OS X from O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter.
There are also a number of utilities that will help you customize icons, from placing a graphic on a standard file folder the whole way to up to creating a custom icon from scratch. Do a quick search on VersionTracker for “icon utility” or “icon folder” and you will find plenty of tools to help you accomplish this task.
The Bottom Line:
So you thought all those pretty little icons were just a waste of time? No way. They can help you find what you’re looking for faster and keep you organized at the same time. Put this simple aspect of the Mac OS to work for you.