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

Solution 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

Solution 2:

Don't forget either that unless you have lots of toolbar buttons or other such objects to fill, its possible to get by with very few icons beyond your own unique application icon and system icons. (Remember to call them from existing libraries on the user's machine, not repackage them, keep the lawyers happy.)

Having too many icons can be just as bad as having some ugly ones. Many guidelines state that if you can't have professional looking icons have some whitespace instead. It can help to keep the interface light and feel uncluttered.