Free Icons
An Icon is a small image on the computer screen that denotes a file, folder, shortcut, command, or any other user interface item. The icon tries to visually convey to the user the type of file or program that it represents. Once users know what these icons represent, it becomes extremely easy for them to identify the contents on the screen at a glance.
Icons are freely available on the Internet for download. Many free download sites offer users a variety of icons classified along various categories. Since the Internet is a place of rapid change, new sites keep constantly popping up while some old sites vanish without a trace. A simple search on a search engine for the term 'free icons' would return thousands of addresses of the latest websites that offer free icons for download.
Since the emergence of the graphical user interface or GUI on the personal computer, icons have become extremely popular. They are a vital tool in the hands of GUI designers in making the computer more user-friendly. Cute and colorful icons also aid in bringing in a sense of fun to the computer interface.
The icons are created by placing a series of colored dots on a square grid of pixels ranging from 16x16, 32x32, 48x48, 64x64, 256x256 even up to 512x512. The grid has opaque areas where the dots are colored and transparent areas where the dots are absent. The background color of the computer screen shows through in these transparent areas. The icons in the latest operating systems can also have semi-transparent areas which is achieved by means of incorporating an alpha channel in the icon file which carries the transparency information.
The icon files usually contain various sizes of the same image within the files so that the operating system can choose a particular size for the appropriate need. For instance, an icon on the desktop may range in size from 48x48 to 256x256, but when the same icon is dragged to the task bar, its size needs to change to 16x16. So an icon file usually contains various versions of the same image in different sizes.
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