I didn't know where to post this, but I figured this would be a good place. I'm curious I see pages with well made icons like Ocarina of Time for their top ranks. But how do you guys do this exactly?

Do you just get a high quality image of you want and scale it to fit in a 16x16 size? What is the proper way to scale it and the methods to retain the quality from the original size?

They get manually resized on upload. I've done a bunch of these for most of the games I moderate, and it often follows a process of, in Paint.NET:

- Find an appropriate/fitting icon, preferably one that's not very big so it needs little resizing
- Erase every pixel around the icon (For this reason, icons that actually ARE pixelated are easy to work with)
- Use the Saturation/Hue tool to recolour the icon for 1st/2nd/3rd places, it's not difficult to recolour stuff to look gold/silver/bronze

And there you go. For Favicons I do the same thing, but dispense with the Saturation/Hue edits.

I didn't know they get manually resized, I thought you had to resize them yourself.