Sometimes... stuff happens

While using Prism for Basecamp I ran into an annoying little problem that all the icons from Prism are the default ‘world’ type of icon. I hated this plus it was hard to distinguish the different applications on my desktop. So I found a way to remedy this situation.

First I went out and tried to find some high quality icons for Basecamp. Low and behold… 37 signals themselves have provided some decent rez icons to be used for just this occasion. There you can find icons for Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire and Highrise.

Fantastic! Now all we need to do is open your favorite photo editor and size these PNG files down a bit. I resized to a width of 128px and let the height auto populate via keeping the proportions. Save that back out as a PNG file and we’re off to the next step.

Now we are going to take that PNG file and upload into a mega useful little web app from Punk Labs called ConvertIcon.

It’s main function is to turn any PNG file into an ICO file and vice versa. Once you are there browse for your file using the “Upload a PNG or ICO” option. Almost immediately you will be shown a download link to grab your spankin’ brand newly converted .ico file.

Put that file somewhere on your machine. I created a folder under my Windows directory called Icons (figured it was the most logical place). Now go to your bland old application icon and right-click and then select properties. Click ‘Change Icon’ and then ‘Browse’ for your newly created .ico file. Click ‘OK’ once you’ve found it and then ‘Apply’. That’s it! You are the happy recipient of a brand new awesome application icon.

These instructions will work with any app (Prism or not) and with any image as long as you like the pic… go ahead and try it.

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