Today, while searching for a good icon set for one of my web apps, I came across an awesome replacement set of Adobe CS4 icons by Pedro-de-la-luna at DeviantArt. Although it keeps the new black letters and isn’t nearly as flashy as his CS3 set, it’s still a sight better than the icons that come with CS4. Stupid Adobe.

It took my coworker/supervisor and I a little time to figure out how to do icon replacement on the Mac (I was a PC child myself), so I thought I’d outline the process here for everybody’s benefit!

First, you need to convert your image (this set came as .png’s) to a .icns file. I used the free version of Img2icns. It is the height of drag-and-drop simplicity and should be fairly intuitive, although there are also screenshots and some instructions on the website.

After that’s done, you need to open a couple of finder windows – one with the location where you’ve saved your .icns and the other where the application whose icon you want to change lives (probably just your Applications folder, although CS4 has its own subfolders). Click on the .icns and press command-I (or right click and choose Get Info, whichever is more comfortable for you). Leave this window open and do the same to the application itself. Make sure you’ve quit the application, by the way!

Now for the fun part: in the Get Info window of the icon, click on the small version in the upper left corner and press command-c to copy. Then click on the same corner with the old icon in the Get Info window of the application and press command-v to paste. You’ll  have to drag the application out of the dock and back in to see the change, but that’s all there is to it. Enjoy!