C H A P T E R 1 1

Icons

This chapter describes the overall philosophy behind icons and shows how to design application, document, toolbar, and other types of icons for Mac OS X.

Aqua offers a photo-illustrative icon style—it approaches the realism of photography but uses the features of illustrations to convey a lot of information in a small space. Icons can be represented in 512 x 512 pixels to allow ample room for detail. Anti-aliasing makes curves and nonrectilinear lines possible. Alpha channels and translucency allow for complex shading and dimensionality. All of these qualities allow you to create lush, vibrant icons that capture the user’s attention.

To represent your application in Mac OS X, it’s essential to create high-quality application icons that scale well in the various places the icon appears—the Dock, Finder and Quick Look previews, alert dialogs, and so on.

Icon Genres and Families

Icon genres help communicate what users can do with an application before they open it. Applications are classified by role—user applications, software utilities, and so on—and each category, or genre, has its own icon style. Creating icons that express this differentiation helps users distinguish between types of icons in the Dock.

Figure 11-1 Application icons of different genres—user applications and utilities—shown as they can appear in the Dock

For example, the icons for user applications are colorful and inviting, whereas icons for utilities have a more serious appearance. Figure 11-2 shows user application icons in the top row and utility icons in the bottom row. These genres are further described in “User Application Icons” (page 136) and “Utility Icons” (page 138).

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