Dan Harkless' "zoom out" and "zoom in" Icons

Date:  

February 17, 2002

Tools:  

Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7.04 on a homebuilt AMD K6-III-based PC running Windows 2000

Info:  

For my online photo album script, image_album, I needed zoom in and zoom out icons. I decided to go with the standard "magnifying glass with plus or minus sign on the lens" idiom, but for the sake of the aesthetics of the image_album pages, I leaned the zoom out icon in the opposite direction from the zoom in icon (note the lens highlights still show the light source to be in a constant location, though — ooooooo aaahhh).

As with my arrow icons, the basis for this was the old "home" icon I used to use in my footers. Because of the rasterization design flaw in Paint Shop Pro 7's Preset Shapes tool, which I discuss on my shapes icon page, I had to keep trying circles of slightly different sizes until I could get PSP to generate one that was symmetrical and correctly rasterized. Setting the line width to more than 1 generated unusable results, so I had to make a 1-pixel-thickness circle and then manually build it up, pixel-by-pixel. I hadn't thought to just paste in a circle generated by Microsoft Paint, as I did with the "shapes" icon. In the end, though, I think the technique I used ended up producing a more realistically bulging lens. If I'd just used a multi-pixel-thickness circle from Microsoft Paint, I don't think it'd look as good.