Best way to create an application icon

Question

What is the best way to create an icon for an application?

From Visual Studio or maybe some another program.

I create an icon in Visual Studio and use it as application icon, but when I put the icon shortcut on the desktop there is only some gray icon. Is this maybe because of icon dimensions or something else?

Answer 1

You simply can't beat IcoFX for the price and feature set.
It's one of my favorite programs, and it makes icon design incredibly easy. If you've been using MS Paint or the icon editor built into Visual Studio, you owe it to yourself to download IcoFX and give it a try.

Adobe Photoshop is the 300 pound gorilla here, but I think everyone who knows (or is willing to learn) how to use Photoshop already knows that.

But really, it might be the case that we developers are fooling ourselves if we think we're icon designers. Aside from a few specialized cases where you can't find the icon you need, you owe it to your users to use an existing icon library. Seriously, even with the best tools, could you design these? I didn't think so.