: How to create Android PNG Icons from an SVG using GIMP I'm pretty much a graphics design noob, as you can tell by this very basic question. What I am trying to achieve is to create a set

@Ravi4787994

The Android Developers link is a bit confusing because it mentions DPI, but you shouldn't be worrying about that. DPI is important for the devices, but it's not necessary for designing the icons (I don't normally use Gimp so I don't know if it has an automatic way of preparing files for different resolutions, but I'll assume you want to do it manually and will create copies for each size).

The important part is the following:


To create an icon for different densities, you should follow the
2:3:4:6 scaling ratio between the four primary densities (medium,
high, x-high, and xx-high, respectively). For example, consider that
the size for a launcher icon is specified to be 48x48 dp. This means
the baseline (MDPI) asset is 48x48 px, and the high density (HDPI)
asset should be 1.5x the baseline at 72x72 px, and the x-high density
(XHDPI) asset should be 2x the baseline at 96x96 px, and so on.




Now to your problem:

You have an SVG file with a set of icons. The documentation says the recommended size for the biggest density is 96x96px. This is because smartphones have double the pixel density of desktop monitors.

That's why a 48x48px icon will look ok in your computer but blurry in your nexus, because your nexus needs more quality to fill the same space. It needs exactly 2x quality, because it's a 2x MDPI screen (it has double the amount of pixels per "pixel space", while 1.5 MDPI has 1.5x density).

In short: You will need 3 icons. The sizes are 48x48px, 72x72px and 96x96px. In the devices, your icons will all look the same size, because they are being scaled to keep a good quality when the screen has more resolution.

The pixels/in issue you mention is for printing, and not for digital, so you don't need to worry about that. Just make the icons those sizes, and you will see it looks good in the Nexus.

These are some other questions that discuss working with app icons:


Best workflow for icon design: Start big, or start small?
Scale layers in a psd file by 200% for retina iPad
Photoshop: How do I keep 1x and 2x (for retina display) images in the same document?
Highest voted retina questions

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