How to make a good looking Icon

how would I go about making a good looking custom Icon for my tooblar/ribbons? When I try to do it in the ACAD editor it's looks pretty crappy. Do you do it in photoshop and scale down? I've tried this but it looks so pixelated.

I just want some of the same quality of standard ACAD icons.

Greenfish Icon Editor, IcoFX, Microangelo provide the tools needed. AFAIK the first two offer free editions.

However I've found they don't enhance one's artistry much, just make it easier to control the technical aspects.

Thanks. just want I was looking for. I'll give it a go this weekend.

Maybe "Pixel Extraxtor-en.lsp" by Highflybird 2012

I also have a pixel dump that looks at the autocad icons from within the Autocad dll etc I am trying to find it. Also search Pixelextractor.exe

The one I played with was Xnresource editor. Their was links here in Cadtutor which described which files to search. I only have a few homemade icons so gave up on fancy ones.

You might also take a look at an image resizing programme such as Avatar Sizer (Freeware).

http://www.avatarsizer.com/

Draw (or find) your image and then resize it to the required icon size.

PS. I have used it in the past to create icons and its what I used to resize the image for my avatar on the left, you can see what a good job it does.

There are also some tutorials around on using Photoshop to properly create icons without the pixilation.

XNView has an option to save most common raster files (such as PNG, BMP, JPG etc etc) as icon files... editing or creating the icon in an image editing application, then open up in XNView and save as ICO works pretty well for me.