File Icon Generator
Consistent file icons are a bit of a pet peeve for me. Icons make download links or web based file managers (like in DokuWiki) much nicer to use. But where to get them? Whatever iconset you use, there is always the one type missing you currently need. A long while ago I even started to compile my own icon set but that suffers from the same problem.
What I needed was some icon set that would cover any possible file extension, would look nice in different sizes and is free to use. So I built one. Or more specifically, I created a tool to build such an icon set.
It's creatively named File Icon Generator and is a PHP script utilizing libGD to build the icons.
Icons are created based on a basic template (I decided for the document metapher) and a colored label. The label itself is just the file extension, the color specifies what kind of file it is (based on its mimetype). Eg. image files are blue, audio files green and so on.
The templates are configurable based on mime types as well, so for the bigger sizes some graphics can be added. Eg. a musical note for audio files.
For now it creates 16×16 and 32×32 icons for 1072 known extensions. And this is what it looks like:
The source code is available at Github and pull requests are welcome.