How to...

# Create a Windows icon

In contrary to the common belief, icons are not just small, partially transparent images with ICO extension. Most icons contain more than one page. These pages are different in size and/or color depth, helping the operating system to choose the icon page most suitable for the current purpose.

So creating an icon means drawing an image in several sizes and color depths. Windows Vista and newer versions recommend that all icon have a 256x256 @ 32-bit page, from which all other pages are derived. The most important image formats are the following:

- Size
  - 256x256
  - 48x48
  - 32x32
  - 16x16

- Color depth
  - 32-bit
  - 256 colors
  - 16 colors

Tip: Start designing your icon prototype in a size even bigger, possibly as big as 1024x1024. Keep in mind that lowering the resolution is always an option.

Note that the color depth cannot be specified explicitly in GreenPixel, it is updated dynamically according to the picture contents. For example, if you want to create a page in 256 colors, draw an image which has at most 256 colors and does not have semi-transparent pixels. If you want to create 16-color icons for the Windows OS, use only the 16 system colors - those which comprise the two topmost lines of the default swatch preset.

## Converting an existing image to a Windows icon

1. Open your existing image file.
2. Should it have multiple pages, select the page you want to create the new icon from.
3. Choose the menu item Icon|Create Windows icon from image and put a check in the boxes corresponding to the formats you want to create.

The newly created icon may have pages with the same size and color depth. For example, there is no such format in GreenPixel as 16x16 @ 24-bit, since that page would have 256 pixels and that means at most 256 different colors - so the format is rather displayed as 16x16 @ 256 colors. If this happens, you should remove the duplicate pages to avoid redundancy.

## Testing your icon

See this article.