Buying icon packs is easy. Making one that actually covers your apps, in colours you chose, is a different kind of satisfaction — and Icon Pack Studio is the tool most Smart Launcher 6 users reach for when they get there. It does not draw icons from nothing. Instead it takes an existing pack, your phone’s stock icons, or images you supply, and rebuilds them under one treatment: one background shape, one palette rule, one glyph style. The result exports as a real installable pack that Smart Launcher can apply like any other. This guide walks through the whole process honestly, including where the studio’s automation helps and where your own judgement still matters most.
What Icon Pack Studio actually does
Think of the studio as a factory rather than a paintbrush. You feed it source icons, choose a treatment, and it stamps that treatment across hundreds of apps at once, generating the two files every pack needs: an index that maps each app’s component name to an icon, and the icon resources themselves. That mapping step is why a generated pack beats a folder of pretty pictures. Smart Launcher cannot guess which picture belongs to your banking app; the pack has to declare it. The studio builds those declarations automatically from the apps installed on your phone, which is also why a pack generated on your device covers your obscure local apps better than a commercial pack drawn for a global audience. Coverage of your library, not artwork fame, is the studio’s real strength.
The treatment itself has three independent parts. The background is the tile behind the glyph: a solid colour, a gradient, a subtle texture, or nothing at all. The foreground treatment decides what happens to each app’s own logo — kept in full colour, reduced to a single tint, outlined, or placed unchanged on the new tile. The mask is the outer shape, although in practice you should leave final shaping to Smart Launcher, because the launcher re-masks adaptive output to whatever shape you have chosen globally. Understanding that separation prevents the most common beginner mistake, which is baking a shape into the artwork and then wondering why the launcher’s shape setting looks doubled and strange.
Treat these numbers as a starting point: apply them in Smart Launcher 6 under Settings → Home screen → Grid, use the layout for a day, then nudge one value at a time — your wallpaper, widget sizes and one-handed reach all shift what feels right.
Before you start: gather honest source material
Your output can only be as clean as your input. The best source is a well-made pack you already own, because its glyphs were drawn to sit on tiles. The second-best source is your phone’s own stock adaptive icons, which the studio can restyle surprisingly well since they already separate foreground and background layers. The weakest source is a random image set downloaded from a forum: mixed sizes, baked-in backgrounds, and no mapping, which means an afternoon of manual assignment. Whichever source you choose, check its licence if you ever plan to share the result. Recolouring a pack for your own phone is normal personal use; redistributing someone else’s artwork, even recoloured, is a different matter and most pack licences forbid it.
Also decide your palette before you touch the controls. Pick two or three colours maximum: a tile colour, a glyph colour, and one accent reserved for nothing in particular. The most convincing homemade packs look restrained. If you need inspiration for restraint, our look at minimalist monochromatic icon packs shows how far a single colour can go when the glyphs stay consistent. Write your palette down as hex values, because picking colours by eye twice, a week apart, never produces the same colour.
Step by step: building your first pack
- Create a new project and import a source. Choose an installed pack or the system icons as the base. Let the studio finish indexing before changing anything; interrupting the index produces a pack with silent gaps.
- Set the background. Choose a solid colour or gentle gradient. Avoid busy textures behind glyphs you have never seen at finished size — what looks rich in the editor looks noisy in the drawer.
- Choose the foreground treatment. For a first pack, a single-colour tint over the original glyph shapes gives the most unified result with the least risk. Full-colour originals on a shared tile are the safer choice if you rely on colour to recognise apps quickly.
- Preview at real size. Shrink the preview to actual icon size, or export a draft and apply it. Judge the pack in the drawer, not in the editor, where everything is three times larger than life.
- Export and install. The studio builds an installable pack file. Install it, then apply it in Smart Launcher under Global appearance and Icon appearance, exactly as described in our guide to applying adaptive icon packs. Keep the project file — you will want to regenerate after installing new apps.
Coverage: the unglamorous setting that decides everything
| Source | Typical coverage of your apps | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial pack as base | High for popular apps, gaps for local ones | Licence limits on sharing the result |
| System adaptive icons | Nearly complete, including obscure apps | Glyph quality varies by manufacturer |
| Your own images | Only what you assign by hand | Hours of manual mapping; keep a source folder |
After exporting, audit coverage deliberately. Open the drawer and scroll slowly, looking for icons that kept a different treatment — those are apps the mapping missed, usually because they were installed after you generated the pack or because their component name changed in an update. Regenerating the project takes minutes and is the normal maintenance rhythm of a homemade pack: generate, enjoy for a few months, regenerate when three or four new apps have accumulated. Users back on the APKBZ home page guides often ask whether this loop ever ends; realistically it becomes a five-minute habit, like re-sorting a drawer. If you later build a second pack for a family member, start from their phone rather than yours, because coverage is a property of the device the pack was generated on. You can see a worked sibling example in our guide to outline and line packs for minimal setups, where a generated set solves exactly this coverage problem.
Polishing: glyphs, calendars, and the exceptions list
Three details separate a decent generated pack from a convincing one. First, dynamic calendar icons: if your treatment flattens the calendar glyph to a fixed date, your calendar will lie to you politely every day. Exclude the calendar app from the treatment, or use a source that declares proper date variants. Second, exceptions: every library has two or three apps whose logos turn to mush under a tint — a banking app whose glyph is mostly white, a game whose art is the point. The studio lets you exempt individual apps or assign them alternates; use that freedom sparingly, for recognition failures rather than taste. Third, contrast: a tint that looks elegant on a light tile may vanish on your actual wallpaper if the tile is transparent. Test the pack against your real wallpaper in daylight, not against the editor’s neutral backdrop.
Finally, name and version your pack like software, because it is software. A name such as “Slate Tint v3” tells future-you which export is current when three similar packs sit in the picker. Keep the project, the palette notes, and the exported file together in one folder. When you change phones, that folder is the difference between recreating your look in an evening and starting from a blank editor, squinting at a screenshot, trying to remember a colour you once loved.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need drawing skills to make my own icon pack?
No. Icon Pack Studio restyles existing icons rather than asking you to draw new ones, so the skills involved are colour choice, consistency, and patience with coverage checks. People who can draw can go further with custom glyphs, but a well-chosen tint treatment over good source icons produces a pack most users are happy to live with.
Will a pack I generate work on another phone?
Yes, the exported pack installs and applies like any other pack. The caveat is coverage: the mapping was built from the apps on the generating phone, so apps that exist only on the second phone will fall back to their stock icons until you regenerate or add them. For family sharing, generate on the phone with the largest app library.
Can I sell or publish a pack made from another pack?
Generally no, unless the source pack’s licence explicitly allows redistribution of derivatives. Most commercial packs permit personal modification only. Open-source packs are more permissive but often require attribution or share-alike terms. When in doubt, keep generated packs on your own devices, which is unambiguously safe.
Why does my calendar icon show the wrong date in my generated pack?
Because the treatment replaced the calendar’s dynamic icon — which contains a variant for each day — with one static glyph. Exempt the calendar app from the foreground treatment, or rebuild using a source pack that declares dynamic calendar entries, and the correct date returns.
