Icon design is a precise art: a blend of aesthetics and readability that takes a long time to master. But by the same token, it’s also incredibly rewarding, and with the right starter’s advice, it can make the whole process much easier for a beginner. Pixelresort author Michael Flarup has republished his article, “The Making of an Icon”, here for MacThemes readers today. We hope you enjoy it!

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Got the Leopard customization bug? While we wait for more to develop on the Leopard front, forum member OneLeggedStanley has done us all a favor by writing up an iTunes 7 theme creation guide. It’s concise and to the point, laying out every step you need to push your beautiful Tiger guiKits into the media organizer (but proceed at your own risk: it’s modifying .rsrc files, and not backing up the original could get ugly). You can see the whole guide- and a nifty example video- at this forum post.

There’s no excuse for not doing it anymore! Previously it required finding and changing the plethora of hex color values by hand, but resident artist Philipp Antoni just released a handy list to simplify this job, complete with the colors’ placement in the iTunes code. Additionally, he created a nifty web tool to generate the 53 (!) color values for the LCD equalizer from a simple image file.
Themers, start up your hex editors and get cracking! Perhaps with this, our years of suppression under the rule of the hardcoded iTunes colors will have finally come to an end (at least until Leopard)