If you’re a designer or developer you’re often faced with the task of having to make multiple versions of icons in different shades & color schemes. Penguin is a utility that lets you recolor icons & export the SVG files to PNGs.
This utility was developed by Evan Conrad, a prolific GitHub contributor. As he states in a recent blog post, he developed Penguin to help himself automate a common problem he was encountering when working with projects that required lots of icons.
Commonly, if he wanted to tweak a shade of gray or try out new color schemes, he’d have to manually change each icon individually. The usual process on a Mac would be to open the icon in Sketch, pick a different color for the icon & finally re-export it as another PNG & SVG file.
While this is no bother when you’re recoloring 1 or just a few icons, it quickly gets old when you’re doing a lot of design changes & have lots of icons to wade through.
Evan’s solution was to automate the process by writing a script that takes a batch of icon files & goes about the business of recoloring them. He then took this command-line script & built a GUI around it that allows you to drag as many SVG files as you want to it, pick a color, & finally export the newly recolored icons.
You can get Penguin on GitHub for free & compile it from source for Mac OS X, Linux & Windows, using electron-packager. If you want to simplify matters a bit & maybe contribute to help the developer to offset development costs, you can get it on the Mac App Store here for US$ 2.99.
The app is currently available in 52 different languages & if you’re going to use it on a Mac, requires OS X 10.9.0 or later & a 64-bit processor.
- This is a startup profile based on publicly available material & not a review -
Image Credit: Penguin
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