If you’re making a folder or drive icon from scratch, it helps to use the same proportions as an existing system icon. Whatever you design is really up to you, but here are a couple of tips that may help make your custom icon look like it came with your system. For this tutorial, I’m going to use Adobe Illustrator to create a real simple circular icon with the Rocket Yard logo inside, mostly because I had the graphic files laying around from another project, so it was quick to put together. Use your favorite image editor (Photoshop, Illustrator, GIMP… whatever you like) to create a 1024×1024 pixel document with a transparent background and draw/paint/assemble your icon. So let’s get started! Create your base image. Then you have all you need to make your own custom desktop icons.
![pages for mac 10.7.5 pages for mac 10.7.5](https://keilshitech237.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/istockphoto-458092791-170667a.jpg)
Later on, I wound up registering a Developer account with Apple so I could use the icon tools in Xcode (well… and for AppleScript Studio, but that’s a different story), and probably tried a half-dozen different freeware or shareware utilities over the years. Back then, I was stuck with 256 (or fewer) colors, a black/white alpha channel, and pretty much had to make them pixel by pixel in ResEdit (uphill… both ways… barefoot… in the snow…).
![pages for mac 10.7.5 pages for mac 10.7.5](https://cleversecret632.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/5/4/125485839/527312554.png)
I’ve been making my own Mac icons for folders, applications, and a myriad of other uses for well over 20 years now.