The days when the design of software icons revolved around whatever aesthetics that designers could squeeze out of a single pixel are rapidly receding. The icons to be found in Mac OS X, and to a lesser extent in Windows XP, are like little digital paintings, and it takes a different kind of savvy to design them. Pixeljerk is a great practitioner of this new craft, and he had a terrific tutorial up there but it’s now gone. There’s also some decent help at Robouk Designs.