Menu Icons Tutorial

[Apocalyptic 0n3]

Thanks to Lubbi for his Arbitrary Fonts Tutorial which inspired this.

Intro
In this tutorial, I will tell you how to add logos next to your artist names. The first time I did this, I ran into the problem that none of the artists were in alphabetical order, which was a put-down. So after some tweaking, I figured out and easy way to do it. You could also use this to completely replace the artists name with an image of equal height.

What You'll Need
IPW
iTunes
iPod
Pixel Editing Program (Paint, Photoshop, ect.)
Microsoft Word
Logos

Notes
This has only been tested on my 4G monochrome iPod so I don't know for sure that it will work with other generations, though it should.

1- Getting Started
-Open up IPW
-Go to the fonts menu
-Choose the font that cooresponds with your iPod (ie 4G=28)
-Save Bitmap
-Save Bitmap again under a different name
-Save Metrics

2- Finding a Character
-Open up your pixel editing program (Photoshop recomended)
-Open up one of the bitmaps you saved in step 1. You will leave this alone for now.
-Now you need to select a character in iPW that isn't used anywhere on your iPod. To do this, use the character drop down menu on the right hand side of iPW (see below). This character also needs to be recognized as a letter of the alphabet, so choose wisely. I will be using Ĺ because I am doing Linkin Park. Make sure that the basic letter of the character you are using is the same as the first letter of the Artist you are working on

-Now once you have found the character you will be using, you must find it on your bmp. You could search for hours on end, or do it the easy way and go to iPW and see what Offset 1 is equal to. When you find this out, make a new image in Photoshop that is that amount of pixels wide. Fill it with white and copy it. Go back to your font bmp and paste it, aligning it to the left. See where the end of the white is and that should be where your character is located.


3- Adding The Logo
-Alright, now get that logo you found earlier. I will just be using a hand made LP logo.
-Erase the character you chose or color over it with white. Paste your logo, or recreate it, into that exact location and resize it so that the height is the same as the original characters
-If your width is too much, simply select all everything to the right of the character and move it as many pixels as you need. Make the canvas bigger if need be.
-Make sure that the logo is all black, because that is all that the 4G will accept.
-Once you have the logo in there, save it.
Before:

After:


4- Fixing the Metrics
-Go back to iPW
-Load your bmp using the Load Bitmap button to the right.
-Find your character again
-Now we need to edit some stuff.
-Offset 1 Shouldn't need to be edited
-Offset 2 needs to be changed to so that the red bar on the right aligns exactly with the edge of your logo farthest to the right
-Modify your width so that it algins with both of the red bars.
-Change the indent to '0'
-Hit the 'Write' button so that your updater is updated

5-Changing in iTunes
-Open up Word and iTunes. Word isn't necessary but I suggest it because of it large library of symbols.
-In word, go Insert>Symbol. Change the font to the font that you are using on your iPod and go to Latin Extended A or B. Find the character that you replaced and insert it into Word. Copy it.
-Go back over to iTunes and select all of the songs by that particular artist and right click on it and click on Get Info. Under Artist, paste your character and then type the artists name.

-Hit OK and update your iPod.
-If everything was done correctly, you should now have a logo next to the artists name

You could also substitute the entire artists name the same way, you would just have nothing but that character as the artists name in iTunes.


Sorry for no actual photos, My digital camera isn't working.