Gorgeous Graphics Go Into Impressive Icons Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Update ID

Nomad Terror has put together a beautiful set of Wing Commander icons, partially inspired by the designs that accompany the recent WC releases on GOG. The specific sources for each image are a variety of box arts, posters and other promotional items. There are several options available for each image: 32x32, 48x48, 192x256 and 384x512. Windows Vista & 7 users should especially take advantage of the high res icons! Additionally, the source .xcf Gimp files are available for anyone interested in further tweaks, although Nomad is likely to expand and upgrade the icon pack on his own in the future. Grab the .ico and .png package here (6 meg zip) and the .xcf source here (15.5 meg zip).
Not that it's a complete cut and paste job (though I do do a lot of that). I do a lot of color, hue and saturation balancing, brightness and contrast adjustment, artifact removal. I also add layered drop shadows to most elements to help them stand out.

Sometimes I do some minor reconstructive work. For example, I could not (and still cannot) find a scan of the SO1 artwork that does not have part of it blocked by a sticker, so I just filled in the gap there.

For Wing Commander 4, the logo was pretty much in tatters after I extracted it from the box art, so I completely reconstructed it -- the IV by my own hand in GIMP, Wing Commander text from the Armada high resolution art, TPOF text from the high resolution scanned manual. Then I used that original extracted logo as a template for sizing and positioning.

For the Proving Grounds icon, I rendered the "Proving Grounds" text in GIMP, reshaping the I, U and S to match the appearance of the title art. It uses another piece of Armada high resolution art. I'll probably most likely come back to redo this one later on, but what I have is a good start.

I do use some in-game text from time to time. The text on the smaller Armada icons, as well as the VotK subtitle on the 256px WC2 icon are both from in-game screenshots.

So, yeah, I'm not redrawing these by hand or anything, and I'm not doing anything spectacular that nobody else could do -- it's just a passion for Wing Commander that spilled out through this creative outlet for me. Plus, I sure do love having big pretty icons to click on when I want to play a game. :>

By the way, if anyone has any ideas or suggestions (or criticism!) for these icon sets, I'd love to hear it.

Does anyone think it would be worth making a SWC iconset in this style? I don't know how Mac OS Classic icons work, or the state of Classic emulators on PC.


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