creating icon without background

[Slurpiette]

hey all, i feel really silly asking this coz ive been using illustrator for like 3 years, but i cant for the life of me figure this one out....

i recently downloaded what i thought was an icon to use when i connect my phone to my mac. Turns out it was a .svg file and it doesnt have a preview image to use as the icon..anyway, i opened it up in illustrator CS2 and altered it a little to suit my needs but now im trying to save it and i cant get it to save without the ugly white, or sometimes black, background...ive tried saving as .png, .tiff, .svg, but every time it has a background.

i imported it into photoshop CS2 and retried to save the file thru there, but it wont go away...

ive looked all over the net at icon tutorials and saving formats, but it just wont work for me.


any ideas??

[Celeste]

SVG is vector, so you should be able to remove the white background. View your graphic in Outline View. If you see a box around your graphic that is the problem. Ungroup the graphic (if it is grouped) then delete the white box. If you are going to export this to another format that does not support transparency it will still have a white background. So export it as a PNG, GIF or just save it as a svg. Hope this works for you.

[Slurpiette]

thanks for your ideas pixelchik, but they didnt work...

its starting to bug me coz ive created icons before and had no problem, the only thing different this time is that i downloaded the actual .svg file from the net, thats it....

..aaarrrggghh! sometimes illustrator drives me mad!

[Celeste]

Are you trying to create and .ico file for Windows or Mac?

[Slurpiette]

i want to create an icon for mac....

i want to use it when i connect my phone to the comp so i dont have the ugly white drive icon that is the default

[Celeste]

I'm on a WIN XP OS, but here is a link with tutorial for creating icons for Mac. Hope this works for you:

http://www.macinstruct.com/node/59