Modifying Fox Racing symbol to create a desktop icon for Phex

Phex is a java-based peer-to-peer file sharing client that runs on the GNUtella network. I like Phex for various reasons I won't go into here. One of the things missing from Phex was a decent icon to represent Phex on my desktop. Unfortunately Phex's fox logo seems to be embedded in the java .jar file, so I had to come up with something else.

I've always liked the Fox Racing logo, but it didn't quite look sharp enough for use as an icon. I wanted something a bit more colourful. I found the logo while searching google images, using ggi: fox icons in Konqueror. Google found it on originalicons.com, one of those pop-up sites that actually have very little original content other than that ripped off from other sites, so I didn't feel too guilty pillaging their version of the fox racing icon for my own nefarious purposes.

There was a problem, however, after I saved the fox logo and browsed to the directory I stored it at I noticed a green "originalicons.com" had replaced the icon. Looking at the icon with the layers on it was easy to see how it was done. I simply trashed the layer with the originalicons.com green screen.

The next problem was that I needed part of the image to be transparent. This proved to be easier than I thought. I used the Select Contiguous Regions wand and the shift key to select the areas I wanted backgrounded, then I inverted the selection, copied the part I wanted not to be transparent to a layer that was transparent.

I needed a fairly quick way to select the parts of the fox icon that would be coloured in. One of the problems with the Select Contiguous Regions default setting is that it only selects the colour you're on, i.e. black. What I wanted was a quick way to select all the grays surrounding the black without selecting the white regions. I accomplished this by playing with the threshold slider. I had to bump it way up to 165 before The Gimp caught all the areas I wanted.

From there I experimented with a few orange hues. I decided to use a couple of orange and yellow hues because they looged good against the white/black and still stood out on my default SuSE 9.3 background.

I saved the icon first as a gif file, converting it to an optimized indexed file. After discovering that KDE doesn't seem to like GIF files I bumped the palette back up to RGB and saved it as transparent png. I checked out the image and discovered a new problem, the image had little white fuzzies around the black border. Using the smallest brush and the eraser tool I managed to blot out the white spots.

Initially when I tried to blot out the white spots I discovered that the eraser wasn't blotting out all spots, so I used the Eraser's Hard Edge feature and that seemed to get rid of the edges. And voila, my new Phex/Fox Racing icon!