Customization has never been in such demand as it is now, and IconCool is another tool for your collection that helps you leave your personal mark on your computer. The program lets you design your own icons, cursors, animated GIFs, and even change the settings for how icons are displayed on your system.

The good news is that there are loads of useful tools, and you’ll be hard pushed to find a more feature-packed icon creation program anywhere. The interface is well balanced with tools grouped aptly around the main editing window. The inclusion of a button to export your icon to Photoshop is a welcome addition, while also indicating that the developer has made an effort to cater for all users’ needs. For creating or editing icons you have the ubiquitous drawing tools, bar an eraser tool, as well as a handy selection of gradient effects that will let you give icons a more modern look and feel.

As you work on your icons, you have a preview in the top right corner of its actual size and you can also hit the test button to see how it looks when placed on the desktop. If you are working on a new set of cursors, there is a separate test window that lets you adjust the hotspot and check how the cursor interacts with a variety of buttons. We liked the fact that there is also an option for customizing the Windows icons, which although may not be expected for an icon editor, is intrinsically linked with customizing Window’s icons.

IconCool isn’t without its faults and our biggest annoyance was the selection tool. The only option you have is to use a rectangular marquee, which isn’t very useful if you are working on any irregularly-shaped icon, not to mention the fact that we experienced a strange glitch whereby for small selections the outline would disappear momentarily only to reappear when the mouse was moved again. The lack of an eraser tool was a slight inconvenience and it might have made sense to have layers, for those occasions when you want to rotate a piece of text without rotating the entire image.

For practically everyone, IconCool will be more than enough to meet their icon design needs, but for those hardcore icon perfectionists, there is seamless integration with Photoshop which will let you get whatever results you want.