Icon-making

[kitchen_kink]

So people:

What do you use to make those cool animated icons y'all have? What I'd like to do is stick some text on top of some pictures, and have them run in a certain order on a repeat loop.

Is there an easy way/place to do this? Do I have to have Photoshop? Or Flash? Or some other damn thing?

Comments

Embarassingly...

[greendalek.livejournal.com]

I use prehistoric Corel PhotoPaint 8.0 and it seems to get the job done. Fire the text and pics my way and I'll see what I can whip up for you.

Re: Embarassingly...

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Oo, I might just do that if I wimp out. :) Hot icon, btw.

[ladytabitha.livejournal.com]

I use Gimp to manipulate the pictures, and MS GIF Animator to animate them.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Okay, so seriously...

Gimp.

Is there fucking TUTORIAL for the thing, anywhere? Because I can't make heads or tails of it.

Like for instance, I wanted to make a banner with a picture taking up a certain percentage of the image, the rest being black, and to blur the line between the edge of the picture and the blackness, then put text over the top.

You wouldn't believe how long I tried this before I gave up. :)

[jennasuze.livejournal.com]

Gimp is the devil. There are no tutorials because everyone who uses it is in this weird open source cult and part of the rules are that you have to claim it's so incredibly easy and self-explanatory that no one could possibly need a manual.

Evil, I say!

[quem98.livejournal.com]

Again, the icon_tutorial community has all sorts of tutorials for GIMP along with everything else.

The tutorials are usually pretty thorough.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Gimp is the devil.

I can stand by this. And hey, isn't the devil supposed to limp? Y'know, goat-footed balloonman and all that....

I think you're onto something.

[quem98.livejournal.com]

I use photoshop to make the stills and then JASC Animation shop to put them all together...

If you want to get fancy, they have all sorts of nifty tutorials in the archives of the icon_tutorial community...
http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=icon_tutorial

Or you can send me the pictures you want and tell me what you want written on them and in what order, and you'll be feuling my icon making addiction (I can quit any time I want...).

[dda.livejournal.com]

I use either Fireworks (tutorials included but not free) or "GifBuilder is a scriptable utility for creating animated GIF files. GifBuilder 1.0 carbon is a version for Mac OS X." which is free but just builds the GIFs from images you supply.

Flash won't help you at all and I find Photoshop to be horribly confusing.