Article Marketing

When looking for an utility to draw or modify icons, what type of products will you consider? A complete image editing studio loaded with features, taking the entire DVD and with a price of over half a grand? Or a fast, tiny tool that costs you nothing, downloads in seconds and is made for pixel-peeping?

If you're like most designers, you'll take the second choice. And you'll make the right choice. While it's totally possible to use Adobe Photoshop and alike to design icons, these tools were never meant for the job. Pixel-level graphics sets its own requirements, and the choice of a proper tool is essential for doing it right.

Junior Icon Editor is a free icon editor created by Aha-Soft, a company known for its numerous collections of ready-made icons. This is the tool they are constantly using in-house to design the smallest sizes such as 16x16 or 32x32 pixels, where each pixel matters.

The free icon editor comes with everything you need to design, draw and modify low pixel count icons. Working with color depths of up to 8 bits per R, G, B channel (24-bit True Color), Junior Icon Editor provides full support for the transparency 8-bit channel, the Alpha channel, bringing the combined available color depth of the image to 32 bits. Alpha channel is a dedicated layer that defines a semi-translucent mask for the rest of the image. Based on that mask, different parts of your image can be opaque, transparent, or semi-translucent. This powerful feature brings two important benefits to icons using the Alpha channel. First, you can forget about jagged edges: your icons will always look smooth all around. Second, your icons will blend smoothly on complex backgrounds including all kinds of colors, gradients and patterns. Icons with Alpha channel are supported in all systems including Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, Android, Blackberry and Apple iOS devices.

If you need support for terminal applications, Symbian OS or legacy systems, you can save legacy 8-bit icons in 256 colors. Talking of compatibility, the free icon editor can open and save icons in Windows ICO, PNG, XPM, XBM, and ICPR file formats. You can use icons in these formats on most desktop and mobile system in existence.

The icon editor includes a number of handy tools to draw and modify icons at pixel level. You can draw icons with a brush, pen, airbrush, use a wide range of geometric shapes such as circles, rectangles, lines and curves. You can edit individual pixels with a sharpie. Existing icons can be rotated, rolled, shifted or mirrored. For 8-bit images, you can pick or edit available palette. True Color icons can use the entire gamut.

Junior Icon Editor is light and quick. Best of all, it's completely free. Get your copy of this free icon editor at free-icon-editor.com.