Images are powerful and are rapidly becoming the focus for computer use. CAD is no longer used only by the technically oriented. Every computer user can benefit from the use of graphics and images. Low-cost CAD systems have opened up the word of images to the novice, student, small business owner, and artist. Most of the CAD systems are usually dedicated to the generation of engineering drawings. The performance and capabilities of such systems are constrained by the built-in graphics commands like line, circle, etc. of the engineering applications. The elegancy of our work lies in the attempt of developing a general and flexible computer aided design system to expert and novice users, that can produce different designs. The result is a CAD system called ICAD. The acronym stands for : Iconic Computer Aided Design. ICAD mainly consists of two parts, in the first part we constructed an Icon Editor (IE ) which enables users of generating easily their icons. The icon editor gives a great flexibility in the use of our system. In the second part we build a suitable environment for the designer to establish the desired images. This part is called icon-based images ( IBI ), which are constructed by the designer, mat allows users to choose the icons to be placed in the icon based images grid, it also allows them to copy, move, rotate, scale, etc. ICAD subdivides the image into several parts, each part represented as an icon. This technique greatly simplifies the creation and modification of the image. ICAD also enables its users to design their images and save them, or update them, as desired. the system is implemented on an IBM PC compatible using turbo pascal version 7.0.