The main concern is always that the icons aren't so horrible looking as to detract from the professionalism of the page. The obvious thing to do is to go for something generic, but alas, I am allergic to generic. Or I suppose I could do a text only website. Perhaps it is simply that my writing skills are not sufficiently good, but I really do think that some information is better conveyed graphically, if only that of mood.

For the renderosity tutorials I wanted to have something that was visually appealing, since Renderosity is an online artists community, and although I cannot vouch for how others react, I know that with so many lovely pictures available, I tend to ignore stuff that is presented in text alone. Since these were for writing tutorials, I used text over the image, to convey the sense that this was really about words... about creating pictures in people's minds using words, actually.

I wanted visual representation of my worlds, to use as page links and to make the worlds seem more real and 'solid'. Without adequate software I found simply drawing icons in a paint program to be easily enough done, but not quite as professional as the results I could get using better tools, so it is a goal of mine to upgrade all my icons. This may take a while.