How to Create Windows Icon Files
- 1). Create the design of the icon file you want to create. Microsoft recommends "grabbing pen and paper and sketching your ideas out," before moving to the computer. This will give you a good starting point when you begin to design your custom icon in your graphics software.
- 2). Open your graphics creation software. If you do not have any graphics software currently on your computer, one free option is to use GIMP. Commercial products like Adobe Photoshop are also good for creating icon files.
- 3). Create a new image file. The standard sizes for Windows icon files are 16-by-16, 24-by-24, 32-by-32 and 48-by-48 pixels. Make sure your new image fits one of these dimensions.
- 4). Draw your icon image in the new file. You have a very small area to work with when creating an icon, so high contrast colors and simple shapes often work better than complex images with subtle color differences.
- 5). Save the image you created in Step 4 as a ".ico" file. This is the file extension that Windows uses to recognize icon files. You can then set this icon to any shortcut in the same way that you would set one of the icons that comes packaged with Windows.
