Roll your own Mail.app stamp icon
If you have Photoshop and a bit of patience, it is easy to roll your own stamp icon for Mail.app.
Thanks to John Godfrey, you can download an icon template in PSD format 
from his web site.
The zip file contains instructions on how to insert your desired image into the template. It helps if you rotate it about 11.2 degrees counter-clockwise and resize it to a width of about 85-90 pixels.
When the image is ready, you can use a freeware utility like img2icns to convert it into an icon file.
Img2icns has just been updated. The new version (0.3) is a universal binary, handles .tiff files better and is smarter about saving the finished product.
Obviously, you can have an enormous amount of fun playing around with this:
Here, after ten minutes work, are a Cult of Mac icon, a productivity-enhancing Merlin Mann talisman, a Daring Fireball logo and a Leopard stamp, just itching for 10.5 to be released.
The template itself has a small graphical bug in it. The space between the lines in the postmark is not fully transparent. It’s not fatal, but I can’t fix it without wrecking the rest of the image (Photoshop genius that I am). Perhaps you can.
Once your .icns file is ready, you can follow the instructions in an earlier Hawk Wings post to replace Mail.app’s default icon.
So get to it. Post me your coolest work and win the coveted “Hawk Wings Icon of the Week” award.
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Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, Dock, icon, mail.app, make your own, stamp icons
July 24th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
I really like the star one! Is there any way we can download it?
July 24th, 2006 at 11:53 pm
Steve, the whole idea is to get your hands dirty and make your own!
Really, it five minutes work at the most and the sense of achievement will last a lifetime :)
July 25th, 2006 at 2:57 am
Yeah, but we are Americans, we like to have things handed to us without any effort.
July 25th, 2006 at 4:14 am
Just because you are lazy doesn’t mean all Americans are lazy.
July 25th, 2006 at 4:19 am
It was not because I’m lazy but because I love the one with the star. I can do thousand of stamp, this is not the problem.
I was not asking for a full ajax script, only an icon! No big deal!
July 25th, 2006 at 9:25 am
Chestertonian: I believe American’s comment was in response to Tim’s allegation on http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/07/23/using-mailapp-as-a-document-archive/ that Americans are too stupid to recognize irony.
I do not understand either why Tim tried to make Steve feel guilty about asking for the Daring Fireball stamp; it really is no big deal.
July 25th, 2006 at 9:32 am
Whoa! I don’t think I said Americans are stupid.
I think I said that irony often has trouble crossing the Atlantic from the UK and parts even further afield. This observation is not original — for example
.
In any case, the ability to detect irony may not be the most reliable measure of intelligence we can come up with.
July 25th, 2006 at 10:24 am
[...] Roll your own Mail.app stamp icon [...]
July 26th, 2006 at 4:35 am
Is PhotoShop essential? If not, how can this non-Mac geek make her own stamps?
–Liz
July 26th, 2006 at 9:00 am
Liz, you will need to find an app that can cope with Photoshop *.psd files.
I don’t know what to suggest because I can’t decide if a “non-Mac geek” is a geek who doesn’t use Macs or a Mac user who is not a geek (suspect the former), so don’t know what to suggest. Please advise.
August 4th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
Thanks, works great. However, when I save my icon as a picture (in my case a .tiff) there is a white box around it. And, when I convert the .tiff to .icns, the white box remains. Any help?
August 4th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Figured it out. I merged the picture layer with the two others, then, I saved the project as a PNG. It worked perfectly. And, Steve, if no one has sent you that star icon, type your email address (if you would like) and I’ll gladly send it over.
January 4th, 2007 at 5:43 am
I am having trouble finding out where and how to paste my picture onto the stamp in photoshop. I know how to paste using the shortcut or menu but how do I paste my picture onto the paste here layer. I guess I just need a little more specific instructions cause I’m also sord of a newb at this. Thanks in advance.
January 4th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
I don’t understand where or how exactly to paste the picture. PLEASE PLEASE HELP!!! Thank you so much in advance. I am so sick of looking at that boring eagle. Thanks very much
February 12th, 2007 at 10:27 am
I have an apple mail icon to contribute. I wasn’t sure how to post it here, so I’ve made a link from my site http://www.michealleavittdesign.com/mail/app.icns.zip
February 16th, 2007 at 6:18 am
For those of you having trouble with the pasting, what I did was select the layer that says “paste here” by control+clicking on the layer’s icon, which gives you the marching ants around the edges. I then pasted my image into a new layer and masked it with the selection.
Make sense?
June 27th, 2007 at 8:11 am
Anyone remember a ride at Disney World called, “If You Had Wings”?
http://core53.com/MISC/If_You_Had_Wings.icns.zip