It’s fun to personalize the tools that we use. Here’s how you can create a cartoon avatar of yourself and use it as your icon button in CATalyst.

When you create a new user in CATalyst, one of your options is to click the Change Icon button and change the icon from the default silhouette image. There are a variety of images of different faces and a couple of writer images that you can choose, or you can select a different image file on your laptop.

A fun alternative might be to create an avatar: one of those little cartoonish self-portraits that you can create in any popular creator app such as Bitmoji (www.bitmoji.com). Once you’ve created your image, in addition to using various editions of that image in messages and social media posts, you can save or screen-capture the image and save it in one of the popular image formats supported by CATalyst: .jpg, .tif, .bmp, .pcx, .png, .xbm, .pct, .tga, .eps, or .ico.

I recently created a Bitmoji account and created an avatar in about a minute. I followed the directions to save one of the Bitmoji “stickers” as a .PNG file to a convenient online storage spot. I then downloaded it to the Documents folder on my laptop.

Now that the image was available on my laptop, it was easy to turn it into my CATalyst user icon! I opened CATalyst and went into my user. I clicked Tools, Options, Manage Jobs/General, Select User Icon. Then, I clicked Browse. I clicked the down arrow at the end of Look in: and selected Documents. I selected my new image and clicked OK. To see how it looked, I pressed Ctrl+u to go Up One Level to the Users Level.

Go ahead, have some fun with your icon!