Making custom buttons - What size/settings are good?

[JiveMiguel]

I'm making some custom buttons for UE 14. I'm using photoshop 7 and I'm wondering a few things:

What size should I use (16x16 for small? 32x32 for large buttons?)
What about background colors? They seem to drop out once I assign the image to a button in the config settings.
Is it true that they must be BMP or ICO only? Which is better?
What color space should I use? RGB or Indexed or ???
And if they should be BMPs, 8-bit, 16-bit, or 24-bit??? Which is best?

How come my buttons look like crud!???? I'm making buttons with basic text on them like

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But the text comes out jaggy and blotchy. Any help at all is welcomed.
Thanks!

[Mofi]

What size should I use (16x16 for small? 32x32 for large buttons?)

On my computers UltraEdit uses 16x16 icons for the toolbar with small buttons and 24x24 for toolbar with large buttons. Switching the toolbar buttons size can be done with a right click on the toolbar and then clicking on Large Buttons in the context menu. It depends on your settings which size your custom bitmaps should have.

What about background colors? They seem to drop out once I assign the image to a button in the config settings.

UltraEdit replaces all pixels with the color of the pixel in top left corner by the current background color. That's okay for BMPs because the BMP format does not support a transparent color, but I don't like it for ICOs which support a transparent color natively - see Colourless Icons for details.

Is it true that they must be BMP or ICO only? Which is better?

Yes, that is true. Use ICO - see Colourless Icons for the reason.

What color space should I use? RGB or Indexed or ???
And if they should be BMPs, 8-bit, 16-bit, or 24-bit??? Which is best?

Whatever is necessary. If you need only up to 16 colors, use a 4-bit index palette with the 16 colors specified in the palette. For up to 256 colors use a 8-bit index palette. For more than 256 colors use a true color image (24-bit). Although my experience with icons is that more than 256 colors for a 24x24 image does not really make sense and for 16x16 images it is not possible (256 pixels). The images are always displayed with the color resolution of your screen (true color). So the number of colors is nowadays only important for the file size of the BMP or ICO which is often also not really important because of the cluster size on the harddisk which is nowadays often 4 KB.

How come my buttons look like crud!???? I'm making buttons with basic text on them like

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The Windows functions for menu and toolbar icons automatically resize an image to fit into the required size. Especially for icons with text such an automatically resized image often looks awful. So it is always better to create the icons with the correct size.