Axialis IconWorkshop 6 Review
Axialis IconWorkshop allows you to easily create modern, great looking icons for your projects on Windows, Macintosh and Unix. It creates Windows icons up to 256×256 for Windows Vista and Macintosh icons up to 512×512 for Mac OS 10.5. Unix uses PNG icons. It also allows you to create image strips which can be used for your toolbars.
IconWorkshop also includes a small plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio. This plugin allows you to quickly launch IconWorkshop from inside Visual Studio to edit an icon in your solution.
IconWorkshop uses a concept of Image Objects. This is a pretty powerful feature which makes it easy to create your icons by dragging and dropping existing icon parts/objects. There are more than 150 objects available that can be combined however you want. The principle behind Image Objects is shown in the following drawing.
There are extra Image Objects Packs that can be downloaded from the Axialis website. Of course you can still use editing tools like pens, brushes and so on.
You can also import images made in other programs and let IconWorkshop automatically create all the different sizes you want in your icon. All transparencies will be kept during this scaling. Templates are available to make it even more easier to create your icons in for example Photoshop. With such a template you design just a few sizes of your icon, for example, a 256×256 version and a 16×16 version. IconWorkshop can then automatically generate all sizes that you want based on those 2 designs.
The built-in librarian is easy to use and allows you to manage all your icons.
The following screenshot gives an overview of the main interface of IconWorkshop. Click it to get a larger version.
Good and detailed tutorials are available for learning how to get the most out of IconWorkshop. All these features together with an attractive price of $49.95 makes this one of the best icon editor/converter/manager program that I have ever used. I’m very satisfied with it and will definitely keep using it 🙂
