This new chapter describes the overall philosophy behind Aqua icons and shows how to design application, document, toolbar, and other types of icons for Mac OS X. To represent your application in Mac OS X, it’s essential to create high-quality Aqua-style application icons that scale well in the various places the icon appears – the Dock, Finder previews, alert dialogs, and so on.
Mac OS X Icon Creation Guidelines
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Certainly does have the best looking icons this side of e17, hope everybody follows this and it stays that way.
I love the first Tip they give:
For great-looking Aqua icons, have a professional graphic designer create them.
I just think it’s rather amusing that this article deals with the old iTunes icon…
I was under the impression that apple’s guidelines emphasized the primary shape to easily identify the icon (but maybe only in toolbars?). To me, that made a lot of sense. I don’t like the current trend in apple software to “encapsulate” all toolbar buttons.
You can read how designing icon is done at http://www.jasperhauser.nl/weblog/