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

Question

I probably spend far too much time trying to make my visual interfaces look good, and while I'm pretty adept at finding the right match between usability and style one area I am hopeless at is making nice looking icons.

How do you people overcome this (I'm sure common) problem? I'm thinking of things like images on buttons and perhaps most important of all, the actual application icon.

Do you rely on third party designers, in or out of house? Or do you know of some hidden website that offers lots of icons for us to use? I've tried Google but I seem to find either expensive packages that are very specific, millions of Star Trek icons or icons that look abysmal at 16x16 which is my preferred size on in-application buttons.

Any help/advice appreciated.

Answer 1

Good icons are hard to design. I have tried to design my own, and have used in-house graphics designers as well. However, building a good icon set takes a lot of work, even for the graphic designer.

I believe your best solution is to buy/find a set of icons for use in your projects.

The silk icon set is a good, free set and can be found at FamFamFam. There are over 1000 icons in this set, and it is very popular.

If you are looking for something "different", you can purchase icon sets for a couple hundred bucks. Considering the cost of having a designer create them for you, or doing them yourself, the cost of these sets is cheap!

Here's a few icon designers I've come across of the web:

• Icon Factory
• Icon Experience
• Icon Buffet