To me the pinnacle of icons was always the MagicWB [0] / MUI [1] style, even though I never really had MagicWB on my systems. Maybe strange choice of colors (pale blue, pink, orange?), but nice dithering and color interplay to create neat 3D illusion built nicely upon the OS 2.0 look.
obligatory susan kare mention - her icons were amazing.
I started making my own small, monochrome icons for a personal project (https://anachronomicon.coldewey.cc/), trying to make them reasonably small while also intelligible, and it's hard once you go below 24 pixels or so! I haven't stuck to any standard size either, but I might later. 32 seems luxurious to me now.
> I started making my own small, monochrome icons for a personal project (https://anachronomicon.coldewey.cc/), trying to make them reasonably small while also intelligible,
It's hard to actually tell from the images on the site (they are all really really large and you can usually only tell the quality of an icon by seeing it at the size the user would).
Any chance you could make a small addition to your site so that your set of icons is displayed at 100% size? Right now it's scaled up about 1500% of the original size.
I go out of my way to avoid icons everywhere possible and mostly have lived icon free since sometime around the turn of the century. I despise icons, but these old Mac icons do tug some strings, I don't hate them and may even like them, I absolutely have some serious nostalgia for the days when they were a part of my life.
Then, once, a designer friend was doing some UI and I suggested using icons instead of edit/view text or something like that, and he replied "I don't believe in the thaumaturgic power of icons" and that somehow changed my perspective forever.
An icon is kind of “visual shorthand”: a way to leverage peripheral vision and pre-attentive processing so a user can understand a control's purpose in milliseconds.
The user won't learn a UI from icons alone, but once learned, distinct icons speed up recall massively. The problem with the modern trend of hyper-homogenised, uniform icons is that they destroy this advantage. When every icon has the exact same stroke weight, color, and geometric bounding box, they blur into a useless mush.
To me the pinnacle of icons was always the MagicWB [0] / MUI [1] style, even though I never really had MagicWB on my systems. Maybe strange choice of colors (pale blue, pink, orange?), but nice dithering and color interplay to create neat 3D illusion built nicely upon the OS 2.0 look.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagicWB
[1] http://www.sasg.com/mui/preview.gif
obligatory susan kare mention - her icons were amazing.
I started making my own small, monochrome icons for a personal project (https://anachronomicon.coldewey.cc/), trying to make them reasonably small while also intelligible, and it's hard once you go below 24 pixels or so! I haven't stuck to any standard size either, but I might later. 32 seems luxurious to me now.
She sells great prints of the original icons, I have two on my walls and I really enjoy them: https://kareprints.com
> I started making my own small, monochrome icons for a personal project (https://anachronomicon.coldewey.cc/), trying to make them reasonably small while also intelligible,
It's hard to actually tell from the images on the site (they are all really really large and you can usually only tell the quality of an icon by seeing it at the size the user would).
Any chance you could make a small addition to your site so that your set of icons is displayed at 100% size? Right now it's scaled up about 1500% of the original size.
I go out of my way to avoid icons everywhere possible and mostly have lived icon free since sometime around the turn of the century. I despise icons, but these old Mac icons do tug some strings, I don't hate them and may even like them, I absolutely have some serious nostalgia for the days when they were a part of my life.
I used to unthinkingly put icons everywhere.
Then, once, a designer friend was doing some UI and I suggested using icons instead of edit/view text or something like that, and he replied "I don't believe in the thaumaturgic power of icons" and that somehow changed my perspective forever.
An icon is kind of “visual shorthand”: a way to leverage peripheral vision and pre-attentive processing so a user can understand a control's purpose in milliseconds.
The user won't learn a UI from icons alone, but once learned, distinct icons speed up recall massively. The problem with the modern trend of hyper-homogenised, uniform icons is that they destroy this advantage. When every icon has the exact same stroke weight, color, and geometric bounding box, they blur into a useless mush.