All Things Customized: Icons

Though I resisted for a couple of months, I finally couldn’t stand it anymore: I had to customize the icons on my work computer. As I’ve mentioned before, It’s no secret around here that I love All Things Customized. I previously posted about tweaking your web browser, but icons are what started the obsession with computer customization for me… Here are a couple of things you can do if you’re keen to give your icons a facelift:

Step 1: Find a source for icons.
There are a bunch of websites out there, but one of my favorites is interfacelift.com (formerly xicons.com). Once you click on “Mac OS X Icons”, you’ll find hundreds of pages of free creative, high-quality icons to download for use. I highly recommend this site; it’s easy to use, the icon previews are really helpful, and I’ve had a lot of luck finding nice icons and icon sets to use on my Mac.

Step 2: Get an application to manage your icon customization.
CandyBar from Panic is a great application to use because it easily manages the replacement of your icons. It also allows you to change many icons that you couldn’t touch otherwise—some of which include the Finder and System Preferences.

CandyBar has four different categories to alter the icons within: System, Applications, Volumes, and App Extras. Under each category, the associated icons show up as they appear in their current state. As with many things on the Mac, all you need to do is drag the new icon and drop it on top of the one you’d like to replace, and then click “Apply” to change them.

CandyBar is also pretty cheap: it retails for $12.95, and I consider that a small price to pay for a seamless, easy way to unlimited icon customization!

Bonus Tip: One of my all-time favorite icon sets is called SY Black, by designer Selcuk Yilmaz. The set is really clean, and fits perfectly with the OS X interface. I’ve been using it as the default icon set for a couple of years now, and I’ve found that I rarely change my application icons anymore because it looks so nice! I contacted him a while back, asking if he could possibly consider adding a couple of applications to the set, so that there were more to choose from, and he responded promptly with an additional set of icons! That may have been a coincidence, but he was really friendly and personable, he really seemed to care about his product, and I recommend him highly.

Check them out! I bet your computer never looked so good…