<p>I probably spend far too much time trying to make my visual interfaces look good, and while I'm pretty adept at finding the right match between usability and style one area I am hopeless at is making nice looking icons.</p>

<p>How do you people overcome this (I'm sure common) problem?  I'm thinking of things like images on buttons and perhaps most important of all, the actual application icon.</p>

<p>Do you rely on third party designers, in or out of house?  Or do you know of some hidden website that offers lots of icons for us to use?  I've tried Google but I seem to find either expensive packages that are very specific, millions of Star Trek icons or icons that look abysmal at 16x16 which is my preferred size on in-application buttons.</p>

<p>Any help/advice appreciated.</p>

We have an in-house designer that does ours, although we also use freelance designers, too.
You could try starting a design competition on
99 Designs
?
There are also some free icon sets available,
like these
.
If you google around, you'll also find quite a few commercially available icon sets that you can use (although obviously neither of the icon set options will get you an icon specific to your app!).
Hope that helps!