28 Mar 2004 | CM Harrington said...

I think the problem with this is that the icons are property of the company who put out the product. It could be a "fair use" grey area, and for the most part, people don't want to bother to fight that fight. Icons can be a registered trademark of a company.

28 Mar 2004 | Fabian Deceuninck said...

Components/a>

It features icons of different operating systems but not of the popular programs you mention.
I think this one's interesting too though.

28 Mar 2004 | Fabian Deceuninck said...

Components

It features icons of different operating systems but not of the popular programs you mention.
I think this one's interesting too though.

28 Mar 2004 | James said...

I don't think its such a grey area, as long as they aren't being used for another application. Things like logo books constitute fair use, and I have an icon book that has the history of several major apps.

Have you seen this? It may be a good place to start

28 Mar 2004 | mikes said...

don't know if you're using OS X, but the developer tools have an icon viewer if I remember correctly.. each package that has an icon has an .ico file in it somewhere.

29 Mar 2004 | josh said...

There's a few interesting "icon semiotics" posts at functioning form. icon iemiotics and the alert icon.

29 Mar 2004 | Brian Hess said...

"all the different application and document icons" could be a heady task if all is the operative term.

For example, the executable for Excel in WinXP contains 21 icons, each in a variety of formats (5 at most). The Flash executable contains 13 icons, again in a variety of formats, most of which are at least 12 versions of the icon ...

Still, if all you wanted were the 32x32 and 16x16 formats, you'd be looking at something like this:

Excel icons

Flash icons

30 Mar 2004 | Derek said...

The universal icons have not been updated in 25 years. I imagine there are some new things to add. "Internet café" and "wireless network available" come to mind, but I'm sure there are others.

30 Mar 2004 | Chris said...

This isn't exactly what you need, but might prove useful somehow...

There's a fantastic piece of Mac OS X software called CanCombineIcons which is designed to allow you to build new icons by combining two existing ones together.

However, a neat trick that it has the ability to extract all the icons from an application. Chose Browse application from the library window, and CanCombineIcons will pull every icon resource out and present it in its library. Photoshop has dozens of the damn things...

31 Mar 2004 | Brian Hess said...

"Photoshop has dozens of the damn things..."

Zoinks! 63 icons in the WinXP version of CS ...

31 Mar 2004 | Chris said...

How peculiar, 66 in the Mac OS X version of CS. If I had your patience or Action :) I'd post the lot and try to work out the extras. Another day, perhaps...

01 Apr 2004 | Brian Hess said...

If I had your patience or Action....

Oh man, I meticulously extracted each one of those from the executable, rendered it pixel-by-pixel in Photoshop, then did a painstakingly detailed comparison of ... oh, shoot, I'm able to get "snapshots" of the icons after extracting them using Axialis IconWorkshop -- the app extracts the icons to a library, and I take a snapshot from there.

I'm forced to use WinXP by day, but use OS X by nite, so I have duplicates of a number of programs (like Flash, Photoshop, and Office) on both platforms.

This is one of those rare occasions when it's useful for something other than flattening my wallet. :-)