For your amusement... a few icon sets for OS X. They're compressed disk images for easy download.


download 319k disk image

This set of icons are all taken from images culled from Maxim magazine - good practice at removing things from their background in Photoshop, although I spent ages doing them largely by hand before discovering the 'extract' tool!
download 188k disk image

The next is set of 'icons of icons', pictures of Gillian Anderson, Milla Jovovitch, Sarah Michelle Geller and Jennifer Aniston.



download 348k disk image

The third set is just of Kate Winslett from her GQ photos that caused all that fuss as they'd stretched her images - frankly I wish they hadn't manipulated them either as long thin things don't make good icons!

How to make cool icons
Any idiot can make a square icon. What makes a great OS X icon is good use of transparency, making an icon an interesting shape on the screen. I'm going to write a quick and dirty guide to making cool icons, and I'll post it here soon - you'll need a copy of Photoshop, something like Iconographer and a copy of Apple's Icon Composer - you can download that from Apple's web site I think or get it in the OS X developer tools CD. The key thing is that IconComposer can open Photoshop files, so if you can get your image on a transparent background in Photoshop - perhaps with a drop-shadow - you can make cool OS X icons that appear to be 'cut out'.