Design Your Own Icons – 25 Tutorials and Articles Designers MUST Have

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With icons, web designers and graphic artists have a good opportunity to showcase their skills, prove their experience and explore their creativity. A well created, good looking icon set is a great way for designers to showcase their work and it may be a way to build up some reputation in the online sommunity. Creating professional Icons and allowing people to download them for free is a certain way to attract attention and visitors on a design portfolio or blog. But how how should you get started with creating icons that rock and stand out from the endless masses? This article provides a large collection of tutorials for Photoshop and Illustrator that currently is the de facto standard tools for this purpose. The article also provides links to some very interesting and worth reading articles on icon design. Get started and please comment and drop a link to your own creations and favorite icon tuts and resources.

Illustrator Icon Design Tutorials

StumbleUpon 3D Icon Tutorial

Learn about designing a 3D social bookmarking icon in Adobe Illustrator. You can download the icon here as well

Glossy Arrow Icon Tutorial

Learn how to design a glossy arrow in Illustrator with this great tutorial.

iTunes Icon Illustrator Tutorial

Great tutorial that will help you master your Blend techniques in Adobe Illustrator while replicating the iTunes icon. The challange of this tutorial is to use various Blending modes and blending techniques to replicate the iTune icon. This tutorial is a good exercise to master your Blend techniques. Download Source File

Photoshop Tutorials

Under Construction Helmet Icon Tutorial

In this tutorial, we’ll be creating our very own icon from a photograph. The tutorial is published by psdtuts and it is of exceptionally high quality and may be used as inspiration for transforming other objects from photographs into icons!

Traffic Cone Icon Tutorial

Illustrate a Traffic Cone Icon in Photoshop, cool icon for “under construction”. Another great psdtuts tutorial.

The Making of an Icon

A great tutorial on process of designing an note pad icon. Download the finished icon from the Icons Section.

Clock Icon Photoshop Tutorial

35 step detailed tut showing how to design a simple alarm clock icon.

Draw magnifying glass

Learn essential drawing skills in Photoshop when creating this good looking icon

World Icon Photoshop Tutorial

Create a great looking world icon in Adobe Photoshop. This tutorial shows some really great techniques.

Glossy Round RSS Icon Tutorial

This tutorial will teach you how to create a round RSS icon for our website or blog with some really cool light effects.

Create a Shiny Lock Icon Design

A popular icon that you can find on the internet is the lock icon. It is widely used to identify secure Web pages. It often indicates password fields for secure files. Wherever you wish to place a lock icon, this tutorial will show you how to create an attractive one for you to use! PSDTUTS Plus membership is required to download the PSD.

Vista Folder Icon

Learn how to create a folder icon from scratch

Making digital watch icon

Glossy Graduation Hat Icon Tutorial

Step by step turorial that will show you how to design a glossy, clean graduation cap icon.

Handy Web 2.0 Icons In Photoshop

When we are working on a Web design project, we quite often need icons to show commands like add, delete, or edit. With the Web 2.0 trend, the use of badges and subtle 3D has become very popular. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a really easy and very nice 3D effect to be used in either buttons and icons or elements that need some depth.

How to Design Mini Icons

Learn the technique of using Photoshop pens tool for creating mini pixel icons. Download PSD

Stylish Search Icon

Learn how to design a professional stylish search icon.

Vista Error Icon Photoshop Tutorial

Learn how to create a Windows Vista erroe icon using basic Photoshop techniques.

Pyramid Icon Design

You will be creating a pyramid icon or logo on this tutorial. All steps are on separate pages – really annoying.

Create a Jaguar Style Folder Icon

n this tutorial, we will show you how to cover an object in a Jaguar style fur texture. In this example, we’ll cover a computer folder, but this technique can be used with any other object, like a CD cover, a mouse, or even a computer.

Creating an XP Style Monitor Icon

Let’s go back in time and look at Windows XP system icons. We’ll get inspired by an old computer icon. Then we’ll create a simple monitor icon in that style. Icon Factory is the company that created the icons for both Vista and XP Windows operating systems. Their works serves as inspiration for not only this tutorial, but many icons created today.