When creating icons for use with Leopard, there are a few things that one must know before embarking on the journey. The first of which is that application icons have the dimensions of 512 pixels wide by 512 pixels high. What that means is that when a user is cruising their hard drives in CoverFlow view in the Finder, the maximum size that the icon can be is 512px by 512px. That’s a pretty big icon if you’re used to working on a Windows machine or rarely use the Icon View in Finder. The second thing that is important to know before working on your icon is that Apple has numerous formats for their icon files. It’s a bit hard to explain, but it basically comes down to this: you’re going to have to save your icon in different formats depending on what you ultimately want the icon to be used for. If you want to paste the icon onto the front of a folder, for example, you’ll need to save the icon differently than you would if you were just making an icon to be used in an application. I’ll touch on this more later.
