Icon Mining
David’s post about alternative icons inspired me to re-post a tip that I originally wrote for Publicious a while back. It’s a tip for anyone who has to put together presentations or materials about InDesign (or other software) and wants to have perfect icons for their visuals.
On the Mac, you can go icon mining by right/ctrl-clicking on an application icon and choosing Show Package Contents from the menu. This works for pretty much any application, not just InDesign.
When you do this, the application opens like a folder and you can see all the bits and pieces that make up its interface.
Find a folder called Contents. It shouldn’t be too hard. Open it, then look for another folder called Resources.
Inside Resources you will find all the little picture files and icons that the application uses. For some apps, there will be more than a thousand (I’m looking at you, Microsoft Word). The .icns are the big juicy icon files. InDesign CS4 has 113 of ‘em, some of which I’ve never seen in day-to-day usage.
When you find something you like, be sure to COPY it to a new location, otherwise you may find the application gets very upset when it goes looking for a resource that isn’t there. You’ll be in violation of InDesign’s EULA, sirens will go off, and the police will break down your door and force you to trade your copy of InDesign for that Quoin thing David was looking for last month. So copy the icon, OK?
You can’t open .icns files with Photoshop, but Apple’s Preview works like a charm. Open the drawer attached to the right side of the window and you can see all the variants of the icon.
Select the one you want and save it as a PNG. That will preserve any transparency and drop shadows. For example, the letters in the InDesign logo will retain their transparency.
From here, you can save it as a PSD, place it in InDesign, etc.
very very nice!
Thanks a lot.
Unless I’m very much mistaken, those icons are usually inside a program’s .exe file (indesign.exe, photoshop.exe, illustrator.exe, etc.) on Windows and they can be extracted and saved as bitmap files using a freeware or paid icon editor/extractor available on the web.
Any concern about printing Adobe’s copyrighted logos after extracting them this way?
Roland-
Thanks for the info on the PC side.
David-
Good question. I just thought of it as a better version of a screen shot, but maybe I’m wrong. IMO, using it unaltered in slides and training handouts promoting the use of InDesign doesn’t seem like an abuse. If anything, it makes their logo look better. But lawyers sometimes see things differently. I’d be curious to hear what someone who deals with permissions and copyright would say about this technique, compared to the use of screen shots, etc.
I do wish that IDSecret’s authors would, in the heading or summary on the homepage, state that their piece is Mac-only — or PC-only. To only find out — by reading the whole piece — that my platform is not being discussed at all in the article is rather annoying. Please consider this point in future postings.
Klaus-
Mea culpa. I’ll be sure to say so in the excerpt from now on.