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In the past MS used http://iconfactory.com/

They did not use internal staff.

But the managers that approve it are to go first.

At least the folks at Icon Factory know a thing or two about iconography, which is as much of an exact science as UI design ever was; part pixel art, part language. As other 'dotters here have happily provided links to not only the historical iconography of Microsoft, but other platforms as well, you can see the evolution of aesthetic choices; the playful isometric simplicity of BeOS, the monochromatic elegance of NeXT, and the neo-realism of Gnome. Saying that the flat colors is a throwback to the primitive computer era (8/16 bit) is rather ignorant, simply because the color-palette choice wasn't a matter of preference, as much as necessity. Back then, the engineers were put in charge of defining the color gamut based on just 16 or 256 'slots' to use. Naturally, the engineers approached this in an algorithmic fashion, rather than aesthetically. That's why it took us 30 years to come up with color rendering that could represent natural/earth/skin tones, because there were all these mathematical gaps in the subtle spectra of blues, browns and greens. In that sense, I suppose the selection of flat saturated colors is indeed ironic in the age of hyper-realistic imagery. I applaud an aesthetic choice for elegant iconography, however the execution can be equally delightful or disastrous.

While I agree in part with the dissent over the design choices, I don't agree that TFA is representative of any significant "majority". Let's be real here, the headline reads, "icons look like a bad joke." Do you really think that contributing readers would be unbiased? You might as well have a big sign out front, "MS-bashing Trolls Welcome!" ...majority indeed.

But here's the catch. It's hard to have a serious discussion about UI choices even in this forum, one that's so inclined to conflate the design with every poor PR move, questionable politics and troubled past of the legacy platform, all making it impossible to take a step back and appreciate the design choices for what they are. It's also important to add that UI choices aren't just about making it artful, but mostly, meaningful. These mini-pictures are purpose-made to fall into the background, rather than be their own eye-candy. (that's what custom icon sets are for)

So here, I'll take a stab at it. This icon gallery clearly perpetuates the traditional Windows brand "manila folder" trope as a foundation. With flat colors and angled lines, it does an attempt at three-dimensional appearance, which arguably does look very 'flat', with or without comparison to its predecessors. While those do not make up 100% of the new icon set, the "folders" establish the overall paradigm and 'look' of the interface. I'm not convinced that the non-folder icons are even complete, since most of them still resemble Aero's photo-realistic set of devices. The icons that notably reflect the new art style are the "My Computer" and "Network" icons, which is a simple line-art treatment style. This is not consistent with the folder paradigm, not only because they don't resemble folders, but because these images are using boundary lines to define shapes, rather than flat colors. Overall, it's rather inelegant and poorly executed. The folders use subtle boundary lines, but inconsistently, and the line doesn't diminish on the smaller icons, making the left face of the folder look awkward, like a backwards "L" from a varsity jacket. Again, we see that the Redmond workshop has neglected the beauty of scale and only centers their model on an 'ideal' size, whatever size that may be, and also belies an underlying framework that is—yet again—bullishly ignorant of modern, precision rendering. As I'm running Win10-TP myself, I can also see that File Explorer attempts to express folder contents a

I agree. They've gone past the "flat design" that Microsoft popularized and transitioned to "the nicest icon a kid could make with MS Paint." I think it's time to give The Iconfactory a call again.

In the past MS used http://iconfactory.com/

They did not use internal staff.

But the managers that approve it are to go first.

The URLs are clickable, at least on the web site and in the app I use to view my stream, called Twitterrific. It sits there on the side of my desktop, occasionally updating. I've found a lot of good and useful information and news from the links in my tweetstream.

Twitter is also more useful if the people you want to follow are already using it. In my case, they are. I can see what the top people in my field are doing and watch in on conferences and meetups that I'm unable to go to. Yes, these people all have blogs, but I don't always have time to read a bunch of lengthy blog posts. Twitter forces brevity.

A few things I personally couldn't live without that are missing from this list

* VoodooPad - for general note taking, todo lists, etc
* TextMate - self explanatory
* Camino - for web surfing
* Paparazzi! - for taking quick screenshots or thumbnails of web pages
* Colloquy - irc client
* twitterific - interface for twitter
* NetNewsWire - Feed reader

As Iconfactory has mentioned, "Scaling vectors that are optimized for presentation at a large size will result in images that look unacceptable at small sizes. The trained eye of a designer knows which pixels to keep and which ones to throw away--automated scaling of an image does not."

The icons were professionally designed:

http://iconfactory.com/design/detail/ubuntu

By one guy. Working directly with Mark.

My suggestion for the art team would be to establish someone as an art director. Someone that Mark trusts to implement his vision. And then have that art director give specific tasks to the designers that report to him.

It sounds like they're heading in that direction by giving Frank Stroep the title of "Artist in Chief". His task now is to tell people what he wants. And if you think it's easy being a hard ass when it comes to design & the people who do it, let me assure you IT IS NOT.

If this doesn't happen, they'll end up taking the "design by committee" approach. The result of this kind of process is something that no one loves -- a lowest common denominator. Sort of like when software is designed by a committee :-)

For what it's worth, I'm a principal in the company that did the Ubuntu work -- so I speak from experience about this stuff :-)

-ch

on the pro side, iconfactory has a great program called iconbuilder. it's easy to use, integrates with photoshop, and builds icons for both xp and os x. great tool, that.

Icon Composer is fine for developers who "just want to get the job done". If you're a designer who's developing a suite of icons with a consistent theme/style, you're going to be using Freehand/Illustrator and Photoshop (easier to review & edit.) To output from Photoshop, they use IconBuilder

When you're dealing with applications that have hundreds of icons (think about MS Office) tools like Icon Composer just don't cut it.

-ch

The Iconfactory offers royalty-free icons and design services. You may want to look into them. They have some nice-looking stuff.

As someone who's done a lot of UI design work I can pretty much say that this idea isn't going to work.

The reason is that graphic artists aren't "scratching an itch" like the software developers who work on OSS. A lot of the wonderful tools that are created have a direct benefit to the people who created them in the first place.

For a graphic artist, there's no real benefit (other than maybe building their portfolio.) And since they typically live off of hourly billings for their work, there's no financial incentives to do these types of projects -- an hour spent working on OSS, is an hour that you won't be billing a client.

-ch

I'd say the layout of Lsongs and iTunes is remarkably similar, though that doesn't bother me -- it's a good layout, and some of the PC jukebox software was moving towards a similar look.

• Lsongs icon
• iTunes icon
• (crossed with the speaker from the Audion icon? You decide!)

We're running Pixelpalooza at the Iconfactory. It's the longest running (and first?) on-line design contest for the Mac desktop -- starting in 1997.

The final submissions are being posted now and we're going to start public voting next week (April 6th.)

-ch

We're running Pixelpalooza at the Iconfactory. It's the longest running (and first?) on-line design contest for the Mac desktop -- starting in 1997.

The final submissions are being posted now and we're going to start public voting next week (April 6th.)

-ch

We're running Pixelpalooza at the Iconfactory. It's the longest running (and first?) on-line design contest for the Mac desktop -- starting in 1997.

The final submissions are being posted now and we're going to start public voting next week (April 6th.)

-ch

Problem is that it's impossible to make a good-looking icon using vector graphics. You absolutely have to use a bitmap. Mac OS X uses 128-pixel bitmaps and scales them with interpolation in real time. Better solution than vector graphics.

Oh like these incredibly shitty icons.

About iPulse

Using its concise and visually pleasing graphical user interface, iPulse displays a multitude of information on the desktop or in the dock. The entire UI is completely configurable so you can turn off gauges you don't want, leaving only what you are interested in for easy viewing.

Rated Four Mice by MacWorld Magazine, May, 2003.

iPulse's Gauges:
- CPU activity (single and dual)
- System load over time
- Network activity (packets in & out)
- Memory activity and usage
- Battery & wireless signal strength
- Network & disk peak activity indicators
- Disk usage
- Current time and date

It's Mac only shareware, but it's it's neat software, and I've been hoping for similar (but preferably open sourced) software for other platforms. Glad to see someone is working on it :-)

• Duality 3.1 - "Scheme" switcher for MacOS X (you say theme, we say scheme, I have no idea why)
• IHeartNY - Custom icons and dock skins.
• CandyBar - from Panic and the IconFactory, allows you to customize any and all system icons, including the toolbar, the trash icon, the default folder icon, etc.

I it kind of makes me mad that they went though the trouble of addressing the "interface issue" and ended up using ugly icons for everthing, Why did they not contact somebody from here

I know that you meant it as a joke, but I think Apple's statement makes sense.

The days of the skilled programmer (but unskilled UI designer) putting together the icons and user interface are over. Well designed applications are the key to making an application useful. I think SoundJam and iTunes are a great example.

Cassidy and Green built the original SoundJam MP3 application, and while it was full-featured, it was a bit of a pain to use, particularly the custom playlist feature. In fact, I never really used the feature since it was such a pain to create the playlist with customized criteria and keep it in synch with the songs I had in my collection.

When Apple bought SoundJam from Cassidy and Green, they renamed it as iTunes, and stripped the functionality down. The most important thing they added was the live searching feature, and the ability to support integrated playlists. Suddenly, the overwhelming SoundJam application became the much more friendly iTunes, accessible to any user. iTunes 1.0 had fewer features than SoundJam, but since its user interface was better, the application was better.

Icons are the same way. When you look at just the icons of 10 years ago, you can see how far we've come. Look at the winners of Icon Factory's Pixelpalooza competition, you can see how even the winners' icons from just five years ago, you can see although they were cute and clever for 1997, they look unprofessional compared to the look of the icons delivered with Mac OS X 10.2.

http://www.kaleidoscope.net/

Macs have whacked interface schemes since Greg Landweber and Arlo Rose hacked this piece of shareware out.

Kaleidoscope has schemes rivaling anything on themes.org.

I've always prefered the interfaces and icons of Mac users create to anything coming out of the Windows or Linux camps.

Take a look at Audion's Faces compared to WinAmp's Skins.

Is there a Windows or Linux equivalent to Icon Factory?