Skinning Icons!?!

Very important: Recoloring or skinning icons does not change the original author's copyright, nor does it make such icons yours. If you recolor or skin an icon that has not been made by yourself you may not upload or share a recolored icon without the original author's permission.

In the next few days Stardock is publishing the next component of it's extremely successful ObjectDesktop. The new component is called IconDeveloper - the tool's , I'm the developer of, main purpose is to make it easy for casual users to create icons and make it faster and more efficient for professional icon artists to do their work. Celebrating the event I decided to write a short article about going really crazy with icons and how to do it with IconDeveloper. What skinning means (but is not limited to) is changing the look of certain part of applications. The article will describe how you can change the appearance of an IconPackager theme or an Icl file (Icon library).

So you recolored your icons already? (If not checkout the article about mix matching your themes with your skins - the functionality described there is now a part of IconDeveloper). But it still isn't enough? Why stop on recoloring? Why not make your icons exactly how you want them to be? Why not SKIN THE ICONS?

I have recolored according to my taste (or lack of it) the great Bant's "Ciela" Visual Style (Please do not ask for the recolored skin. Curtesy of Bant, it's available here for free and you can easilly recolor it with SkinStudio). It has a kind of toxic look now, which if you have seen the screenshots in some of my previous articles, you have probably noticed I've developed a taste for.

Since i can never get enough of the marvelous PixOs icons by Paul Boyer I have decided to recolor them to match the skin.



But since I've done the recoloring already, should I stop there? Let's open the modded "PixOs Toxic"...



Select a new name for skinned theme and specify that I want to actually "skin" it...



Now what can we do here... I know! Let's set it on fire!



Or make it suffer in a really polluted environment... sorry Paul



and actually make it ultimately match my skin of choice... and a bit smoked (Why? Why not?!). To do this I've had to edit an image from the Visual Style to create a bevel I can now use as a background (made for sake of this artticle only). You can actually use any image for either a background or overlay - just press the "Browse" button and select the image you want to use.



The possibilities are countless. IconDeveloper comes with a number of backgrounds and overlies for you to toy with, but the real potential is in your creativity. Make your own icon's skins. The sky is the limit!