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Icon Design Guidelines

For application icons, you should make sure that the icon family includes images up to 512 x 512 pixels. At the very least, the icon family should contain artwork for 1x (128 x 128, 72 dpi) and 4x (512 x 512, 288 dpi) sized images.

For new icons, it’s easiest to design the large icons first and then decide how to scale them down. When scaling up existing icons, the enlarged versions should look like close-ups of the existing icons, with the appropriate level of detail. For example, a house icon may show shingles or shutters in the larger sizes, while a large book icon may actually contain readable text. Do not simply create a pixel-for-pixel upscaled version of the existing icon. Figure 3-1 shows the changes in detail for different icon sizes.

You can use the Icon Composer application to create your icons. Icon Composer v2.0 and later includes support for larger icon sizes. This utility is available in the /Developer/Applications/Utilities/ folder.

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