Care to Share: Where is the Icon Love?

[akirlu]

I keep spiraling around the idea of getting a paid account for LJ. Mostly for additional functionality. But I waver. I waffle. Foolishly, I would be more likely to topple over that particular precipice if I had more wildly cool icons than I knew what to do with at any given time. So, in pursuit of bribing myself -- where do you get your favorite icons? Got any good tools, producers, or resources you'd like to share? Where and how should I be finding, making, or otherwise procuring my icons?

Comments

I can haz icons

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

At some point, LJ started to accept almost any image and convert it to an icon for you. I, as usual, missed the memo. You can use anything that can export an image to create them. You can also steal borrow 'em.

100 X 100

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

You don't have to cut 'em down any more. LJ will do it for you. Maybe not as good as a Mac, but good enough.

http://www.livejournal.com/editpics.bml

Acceptable formats are GIF, JPG and PNG

Re: 100 X 100

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Wow. Yes, I definitely missed the memo on that one. That's very handy, now. I just spent far too much time diddling around with images I already had.

[eleyan.livejournal.com]

I bought a paid account once and realised that in a year I basically had not used any of the extra features so did not renew it. But I am a Luddite in many respects.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I'm a late adopter, myself, and I may not use the extra features much, but the weird thing that occurred to me is that, as long as LJ is still a fairly lively location for my friends and community, being able to phone- and text-post to LJ might actually be a useful emergency contact and information dissemination resource. I may be wrong about that, but it seems worth fiddling with.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

I'm extremely low tech - I search on Google Images for a subject area, browse through the results for a small item that I like, and then use low-level tools like Preview (on the Mac) to cut it down to 100 x 100. Or I steal them :->

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I suspect Larry's comment was supposed to be to you -- it looks like you don't have to cut down images beforehand any more. LJ does it automatically when you convert an image to an icon.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

book_icons, lecollage, papersquares and windblown_song all do nice icons.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Marvelous! Thanks for the links. You are the queen of gorgeous icons.

[laurel]

The El Jay Icon maker and the Firefox extension that works with it can be handy for making simple icons from pix you run across on the net.

There are tons of icon communities and journals on LJ. Some I follow: basicbases, retro_icons, good_cropping, historicons, book_icons, 100x100movies, 100x100tv, good_tvicons, and a zillion ones for icons from specific TV shows.

If you find someone who has icons you like, check out the info for the person who made the icon-- lots of people who make icons have icon journals where they post their stuff.

fandom_moods is a good place to find mood themes.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Wonderful! Thanks for all the linkiness!

Iconoclasm

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

If you're fond of icons, that's fine (I suppose), but... personally, I pay almost no attention to them, and would much prefer that most people spend their time & energy on posting more ("and better" might be optional, though not applying in this case) text entries.

Re: Iconoclasm

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

For me it's different parts of my brain -- when I want to fiddle with images it's not at the cost of writing, it's at the cost of other image-oriented activities. So I will work on posting more and better, too, but meanwhile, I like me some pretty pictures.