ReactOS Icon Guidelines

It seems that lately people are forgetting and having issues with making icons for ReactOS.

What the icon needs

The icon needs to contain the following image sizes: 48 pixel 32 pixel 16 pixel

24 pixel images are not needed and these are only needed for toolbar bitmaps.

The Tango Project also states that "Each of these sizes needs to be treated separately, simple scaling of a larger icon doesn't work and ends up looking fuzzy and unclear." This is one of the biggest issues when people create icons: For the 16 pixel icon, they simply scale down the 32 pixel icon. Sometimes, they even scale down 48 pixel icons to 32 pixel images. This then causes the icons to look blurry and as a result, the entire icon looks like garbage and ReactOS looking terrible.

After adding the images, the icon then needs to have 256 bit and 16 bit versions added along with the 32 bit images.

For the start menu, the icons used are 32 pixels, but the image is actually a 24 pixel image CENTERED. The sub items however, are 16 pixels.

Summary

Icons created for ReactOS will need to follow these icons otherwise they will need to be fixed before getting committed. ReactOS's icons used to be filled with these issues until I (Pi User5) came along and fixed them.

Tools and links

Tango Icon Theme Guidelines Tutorial on making icons for ReactOS MSDN Article about icons