Ferret actually hires a team of highly skilled hand picked weasels. These weasels are born and bred from day 1 to become quest icon artists and are quite expensive. It's one of the reasons why the integration of AG3 is taking so long, as well as the lag time of other updates. I mean, why do you think it took an excess of 5-6 years for one edit button? Quest icons are money!
The individual weasels all go into their cubicles to begin work on their quest icons. Each quest icon on average takes a process of approximately 9 months, 12 days, and 4 hours to create and then the artwork is sent to the Bureau of Arts and Culture to be analyzed, refined, and then accepted or rejected. There is then a week of waiting time before the accepted quest icons are sent to the AG headquarters (Not the CA one, the real headquarters is located on a moonbase. This is for confidentiality purposes.) where they are each individually processed and converted into small pixelized jpegs.
After a quickly checking all of it over for any mishaps and/or faults in the artwork, the jpeg files are then uploaded onto the Armor Games website where it is cleaned, polished, and licked clean. The resulting product is the quest icons that you see here today.
Well I hope that answers your question, and hopefully the admins don't take down this post in fear of confidentiality breaches. =)
