pgg1
13th February 2009 11:57 UTC

Desktop Shortcut Icon loses clarity
Hi

My desktop shortcut icon looks fine on some machines but not so good on others - It loses clarity becoming slightly blurry.
I suspect it is down to the screen resolution of each machine.

The .ico dimensions are 32x32 and the file size is 4KB. I use this icon for the Desktop and Quicklaunch shortcut. I've tried making the .ico larger to 48x48 but to no avail.

In terms of the .ico how do you get it to look really crisp. Ideally we would have vector graphics which scale up without any loss, however, .ico are raster images and once scaled up lose quality (e.g. pixelated) which doesn't help.

Any ideas anyone?

Regards

Paul

Yathosho
13th February 2009 12:57 UTC

i suspect that some of the test computers display the icons at sizes larger than 32x32, so there's no way but creating larger versions of your icon. it usually helps to put the scaled up icon in one layer (of your image editor) and then to redraw it on a second layer. sometimes you just need to redraw the outlines. that said, it's always best to start your icon as vector graphics, though even downsized icons might need some extra work.

have you tried vector magic yet? it doesn't always produce good results, but you can usually proceed from there.

Anders
13th February 2009 16:27 UTC

the normal quicklaunch size is 16x16