Since I began running 3 years ago I have been looking for a way to bring my two passions together; Icons and Running. This year I joined the “Team In Training” to help raise money for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I am running 5 marathons this year, including the Alaska Mayors Marathon, along with my wife, as a member of the “Team In Training.” We set a fundraising goal of $10,000 dollars between the two of us. This gave me my chance to finally bring my two addictions together. I’ve done this by creating the “Marathon” Icon suite.

In the Marathon Icon suite I tried to capture the scope of running a marathon by creating a uniquely colored IconPackage for each mile of the Marathon -  26 IconPacks for 26.2 miles. The result is an amazing variety and over 1200 icons that will complement any desktop. To top this all off I included three additional IconPacks, themed for the “Team in Training” so you can show your support to the world, making a total of 29 IconPackages. This, to my knowledge, the largest Icon suite ever.

Stardock has been generous enough to join in my efforts, and will donate all the profits from this pack as well, so 100% of the profits from this suite will go directly to the The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to help save lives. 

I hope you will join me in supporting this cause. As someone who has lost family to Leukemia, it is near and dear to my heart. On June 20th of 2009, my wife and I will be running across the finish line in Alaska, in memory of my Uncle, and in support of my brother-in-law. In the end it will be those of you who support me by purchasing the “Marathon” suite that will have made it possible.

For additional information about our story, or to donate directly to the cause, go here:

For additional information about The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, go here:

If you don’t already have IconPackager, you can download try it out, get it here.

To help save lives, and get the full 29 pack suite, go here.

I will be out of the country for the next week, so I will be putting the Icon-A-Day tutorials on hold until next Thursday. Luckily I had found something good to post that should be able to give everyone something to play with while I am MIA. Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 Bringing LaST up to date Months ago I was asked to update the IO Iconp...

Last week I was lamenting that we were done with the simple User folders, but wait, I forgot one. I missed it because it did not exist in XP. After digging around in the original icons, I realized that we have pretty much have everything we need to make the new Search folder. Day 15 (Monday, August 25th, 2008) The Search Folder. When I started looking around the User f...

My original plan we to do a Video tutorial of today's icon, however after I got all the assets together I realized there was nothing particularly difficult. I realized that we can pretty much do today's icons by just tweaking our existing assets. So it looks like our first Tutorial Video will have to wait for a bit, but some videos will be coming along soon. Promise. Day 14 (Friday, August 22th, 2008) ...

Today we will dive back in to the core user folder with the Music folder. We will be basing it on our Original Icon-A-Day My Music Folder , and will be using almost the same exact steps. However, because of the change in folder size, we will need to recreate almost all the assets for our 2.0 version. Day 13 (Thursday, August 21th, 2008) The Music folder The origin...

Today I spent most of my Icon-A-Day time figuring out how to get some videos to integrate in future tutorials. Unfortunately this left me with very little time for tonight's icon, but luckily we have a quick one available; the Links folder. Day 12 (Tuesday, August 19th, 2008) The Links Folder The Links folder is another of the new addit...

As we enter week three of the Icon-A-Day 2.0 tutorial series I stop and ponder, why, why am I doing this? well the answer seems pretty simple: I am crazy.  Of course, this seems to come up often on Mondays. Luckily my insanity is of a variety that won't let me give up on a project once I said I would do it, so with that said, let us dive back in to the User folders with one of Vista's brand new special folders. The Downloads folder. ...

Yesterday we created the first of our User folders, the Favorites folder. In doing so we established the style we will be using for the rest of them. Today we will move from that one to another of the simpler examples, the Pictures folder. Day 10 (Friday, August 15th, 2008) The Pictures Folder The Pictures folder remains more or less th...

Yesterday we created a "Wrapper folder" and we will be using it as the key ingredient for our User folders. Tonight we will start with one of the simple ones, just to see how it works out. Day 9 (Thursday, August 14th, 2008) The Users Folder: In the past, the favorites folder was tucked away in the depths of the Documents and ...

Windows Vista has brought us a great many things, some good, some bad. One of the less noticed changes is the new User folder structure. With this they have changed one of the staples of windows customization and icon design in general. Day 8 (Wednesday, August 13th, 2008) The Users Folder: In Windows 95 through XP, user folders (My Mus...

Windows Vista made several changes and additions to the way folders are displayed. The most obvious change is the Live folders; subtler is the addition of the Data folder. The Data folder is often mistaken for a Live folder, but is, in fact, simply a folder, with another folder inside of it. It is used whenever a folder contains one or more sub-folders. The Data folder is used even if those folders are empty. Day, ...

Before we get to much further into the 2.0 update of the Icon-A-Day icon package, I want to take a moment to create a new index page so we can keep track of each step in the process.  Day 6 (Monday, August 11th, 2008) This index will give us a convenient home for the Icon-A-Day 2.0 project. As the project continues I will update this index with links to eac...

On Day 3 we created the new Closed Folder icon, and then on Day 4 we took that folder and created our Open Folder. Today we will take it even further and use our Open Folder to create our Windows Vista Live Folder. Day, 5 (Friday, August 8th, 2008) In Windows Vista, if you have your folders displaying at any size above 48x48, just about any folder you see is a Li...

Back in the dark times of 2005, we did not have such things as Live Folder, and the Open Folder was a rarely seen anomaly on the Windows desktop. Now things have changed; though you rarely see the actual Open Folder icon, you see the Live Folders everywhere. We will take advantage of this to finally give the Open Folder some love, and I will try and explain just what goes into the Vista Live Folder icons along the way. ...

The first Icon in the original Icon-A-Day series was the Closed Folder. I have to admit that I was not quite sure what I was getting into at the time. This time I do, so we will begin once again at the beginning, with the Closed Folder. Day, 3 (Wednesday, August 6th, 2008) The funny thing about the Closed Folder icon is that by default, in Vista it is no lon...