30 articles & tutorials to improve your icon design skills
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While it’s easy to find free icons on the Internet these days, the best way to make your website’s design unique is to create your own custom icons. If you have never done it or have little experience, you should definitely take a good look at these icon design tutorials and articles.
Getting started with icon design
While these articles are not really tutorials, they are great resources too understand the basics of icons creation.
1. Icon design explained (quickly)
A presentation by John Hicks, a great watch for designers who want to understand some concepts before creating their first icons.
2. 7 Principles of Effective Icon Design
Great pieces of advice in this article on PSDtuts, a must-read whether you’re a seasoned icon designer or not.
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3. 10 Mistakes in Icon Design
While it is good to know what to do when creating icons, it’s also good to be aware of mistakes to avoid.
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4. Icon Design: Bitmap vs Vector
An article that answers the following question: “Why do you deliver your icons individually sized in PNG or GIF files, when a single vector file like SVG or EPS can be made any size we desire?”

5. 10 Tips for Effective Icon Design
More tips to help you understand how icon designing works.
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6. The making of an icon
A complete walkthrough the creation of an icon, gives a great overview of the process.
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Icon design tutorials
For a more practical approach, here is a list of tutorials that will help you to understand how icon design work by doing it.
7. How to Design Mini Icons
8. Create a shiny icon lock design
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9. Drawing A Pencil Icon
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10. Creating an XP Style Monitor Icon
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11. Create a closed book icon
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12. 3D Mp3 Player
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13. Design a calendar icon
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14. Create An Aperture Style Camera Lens Icon
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15. USB stick icon creation

16. Photoshop Electronic Torch Light Icon
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17. Custom Hard Drive Icon tutorial
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18. Design a Detailed Compass Icon in Photoshop
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19. Create a Custom Mac OSX Style Address Book Icon

20. How to Turn Glasses into a Great Geek Icon
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21. Wii mote controller tutorial
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22. Anatomy of an icon
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23. Make a Handy 3D Vector Calendar Icon
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24. Creating a Cool Yellow Helmet Icon
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25. Create a computer icon
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26. Laser Printer icon creation

27. How to Create an Alarm Clock Icon
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28. Paint brush icon in Photoshop
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29. How to Create a Van Icon in Photoshop
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30. How to make a Calendar icon
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Icon search engines
If you’re not going to create icons by yourself but still want to use it in your design, no worries. There is plenty of icons search engines out there:
- Icon Finder: http://www.iconfinder.net
- Icon Search: http://icons-search.com
- Icon Look: http://www.iconlook.com
- Icon Seeker: http://www.iconseeker.com
- Iconlet: http://www.iconlet.com
- Very Icon: http://www.veryicon.com
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I never know who much detail was involved in creating an icon – thanks for the article.
The simpler and more laconic the icon, the better. It is preferable to keep the number of objects in a single icon to a minimum.
Greta collection of tutorials to improve icon design. I was personally liking the one of the 3D looking lock by PSDtuts which is really good. Thanks for the resource.
useful tutorials, really beautiful roundup for learn about icons designing.
very good tutorials.Thank you for share
Thank you man,these are very useful tutorials.Good work !!
awesome ….great bro
Very good article, I will stress this blog regularly because there are a quality content. I wish the same time take the opportunity to publish our video Our graphic design studio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yNdCFLLWks&feature=player_embedded
Hey, you missed our blog, a lot of icon tutorials and articles: http://iconlibrary.iconshock.com
Thanks
JP
Great, useful list. I have never really created my own icons, this is a perfect way to start learning.
Thanks.
Thanks for this wonderful List! I think we can design good icons by implementing just 5 of them
Btw, you need to add twitter, facebook, etc buttons to your site =)
successful and wonderful.
These are great tutorials and they have really helped me in improving my icon design skills. Each tutorial helps emphasize a different design aspect.
This is a great collection of resources! Thanks for sharing.
Excellent info. I’m new to this sort of thing and very much appreciate this type of info on the subject. Thanks alot!
great bro, thank you