Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Now You Can Create Your Own Desktop Icon!

by: Paul I. Etkin

There are some people who put as much effort into customizing their computer desktops as they do into decorating the tops of their desks or even rooms. I have personally seen friends of mine spend hours looking for the perfect desktop icon which reference some show or other that they used to watch in their childhood in the 70s. And no matter how obscure or rare the desktop icon, someone, somewhere in this universe of ours has at the very least a pirate version of it, often as part of a theme. There are countless desktop icons floating around, that the number will probably never be known.

Certainly the best way to get all of your icons is as part of a desktop theme. Desktop themes comes with icons, background pictures, event sounds, and even color schemes all on the same subject to convert your desktop into a seamless color-filled, decorative scheme. For example, I used to have a Scooby-Doo theme, complete with a desktop icon for every character. There was even a mystery machine desktop icon with little rolling wheels that informed me when the computer was busy loading something. The coolest thing about that desktop theme was the little “zoinks” sound that it made each time an error occurred. And since I was running Windows, that happened rather frequently. The Scooby Doo desktop icon itself was way snazzy IMHO.

If (and this is a real IF) you really have a thing for desktop icons, the best thing to do is to create them yourself! How fun is that?! You can quite easily download a desktop icon creator, and you wouldn't believe how easy they are to make. Every desktop icon is really just a very small, fairly low-resolution picture. This means that you can probably create the perfect desktop icon with a little imagination and creativity, as well as one to two hours of your time.

I have also been told that certain desktop icon creators can shrink photos into desktop icons for you, saving you precious time that it takes to create them, but I do not know if this actually exists. The best thing is to try it out yourself if you are really interested. Like any other program, the desktop icon creator software can be found in either free or trial versions (just google it), so it not that difficult to get hold of and start using. So then you will finally have those perfect desktop icons you have always dreamt of having!