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Susan Kare: Mother of Icons You Love (or Hate)
bughunter writes "One of today's Yahoo Daily Picks is the personal exhibit of Susan Kare: the mimimalist creator of most of the original Macintosh icons then, later, the iconic elements for Windows 3.0, and she didn't stop there. More than just icons, her GUI elements have become part of the modern collective subconscious - trashcans, bombs, and Happy Macs are universally recognized by computer literate persons the world over. (I can personally attest that the Mac System 6 beachball is burned into my soul...) She deserves some recognition of her own."
fp
howyadoin?
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@kare.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
"More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
He's taken the money and isn't giving it back!!!
I believe it is one of those African-American fellows, if that helps. He is crooning about his very special girl and how she is a beauty.
See subject.
as the image server is already /.'ed
Zero comments and already /.'d.
BTW, many of those icons are recognizeable even by computer-illiterate people too.
Pictures is pretty.
World going to war
SARS killing people like crazy
Everybody hates America
icons?
I too am a mimimalist and must contact her, I thought I was the only one.
This was /. before it even went live. Here is the google cache but it won't let you see the pretty icons.
I'm actually wearing a Susan Kare t-shirt right now.
The one with the bomb icon on it.
I don't wear it at airports.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
it isn't burned into your soul, because it isn't a beachball, it's a watch. The minute hand turns.
Dork.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
Slashdotted without a comment in sight!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
On the part of the site that was working, the pixel fonts reminded me of a time I tried to make Microsoft Word have the look of the old DOS Wordperfect. I managed to make the background blue, though it was really bright, and I managed to make the text gray. But I couldn't find the right monospaced, pixelly font. Has anybody else tried to do this, or am I just psycho? I thought that Wordperfect was much more fun to write in. I always felt like Doogie Howser.
(Also, for a supposed icon expert, how come the portfolio icon doesn't really evoke portfolio so much as "person writing"?)
...the icon I'm staring at trying to look at this already-slashdotted page? Did she make this one too?
If you click the Windows 3.0 icons you get an error. Its so cool that she managed to emulate windows on her web page :)
/.ing has died down I think it will really be worth a look even for a retro kick. She designed the solitare cards for God's sake. How many hours of my life has that accounted for? :)
Seriously though when the
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I'm kind of curious how a beach ball is representative of busyness or waiting. Plz explain.
I remember when I owned my Amiga there was a person who created an application called Magic icons. It changed the way the Amiga's desktop looked and for the most part a large number of Amiga users defaulted to using that application.
Her server resources were even more minimalist than her icons...
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
trashcans, bombs, and Happy Macs are universally recognized by computer literate persons the world over
WTF is a Happy Mac?
I'm computer literate. I've worked on dozens of systems from the commodore PET to the IBM Sys/36 and AS400 to HP 3000 and lately some of the Stratus boxes that started rolling through our companies 'bullpen'.
I've never used a mac except a few times in passing. It was designed explicitly for the non-computer literate.
Oh well, I guess owning a Mac makes you some sort of IT hero around slashdot.
You know what a Happy Mac is but don't know what 'hashing with buckets' means or what a b-tree does or what a two handed clock algorithm for freeing memory is all about.
It's like calling those chimpanzees who point at the picture of a banana when they're hungry 'literate'.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Well, scratch a few thousand more people who aren't going to recognize her legacy because her website can't handle the traffic.
Seems kind of appropriate considering.
bandwidth, and a misconfigured apache install.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I gotta say that cute icons make a difference. I hate the crappy ones that most software use. Designing an icon that is distinctive and has an obvious functional message at 20 * 20 pixels (or whatever) takes a certain kind of talent.
I remember the happy mac startup icon from 1984... when the Mac was happy, *I* was happy. When the Mac had a twisted mouth and Xs for eyes, I wasn't.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
...So much so that we do not even need to see the article.
I'd never really thought of icon creators as artists before, but I suppose they deserve recognition with the more familiar artists.
Just think: together with the "NBC Peacock" guy and a handful of other logo creators, Susan Kare's "art" has probably been viewed and used my more people, for more hours, than any conventional artistic works in human history... and all in the space of two short decades.
I'll never forget the first time I saw the "sad Mac" icon during bootup. It made me chuckle and would have been even more amusing had it not been for the fact that my system would no longer boot.
I stopped using macs soon after that.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
She also worked on some of the icons at Eazel (she did the first Nautilus vector theme) and some of the fonts for Danger (who make the hiptop/sidekick).
I was expecting to at least see some sort of sad/broken/dead/flaming server icon, but the message was just plain text.
:(
Oh well, I'll just have to make my own
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Ha, she isn't famous for the mac icon, but for the thousands and thousands of solitare gamers world wide.
... we will see tomorrow ;-)
Seems like the server is a bit slower now and the portfolio cgi is broken.
I wonder... how many slashdot.org dupes and bad Jokes
I wonder what an icon would look like if you wanted it to say "Oh shit, I've been
I remember in the days of Windows 3, there was a dll icon file that was about 300KB ... and scrolling through it on a 386 SX took about 10 minutes! Can't remember it's name though.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
If you just search for Susan Kare using Google Images, you'll find quite a few examples.
I can't reply to specific comments. I can only start new threads. Is it just me or is this a new policy on this site? Free speech my ass. Taco, just get rid of ac's completely and stop adding (undocumented) anti-ac functions to your craptastic website.
Karma whoring mode ON:
Google Cache Links:
iconic elements for Windows 3.0 [Google Cache Link]
original Macintosh icons [Google Cache Link]
kare's portoflio shows to her credit:
mac paint,
macintosh icons
macintosh fonts (like classic chicago!)
windows 3.0 icons
windows solitare
os/2 warp icons
7 pixel fonts
her site is getting hammered already. the coolest part of susan kare is she had no template for the creation of her art. she gave form to predesigned functions. she's sorta like a Jonathan Ive way back when.
Good. So instead of just /.ing her, we do it on a day when the site's address has just been emailed out to thousands of link-starved people too.
Script Kiddies wish they had that much power.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
All of them. Here's why:
Processing an icon takes another level of brain processing, another level of indirection. Even the lowly trashcan: Its appearance varies widely from desktop to desktop. The word "trashcan" is widely recognized in the language of your choice, regardless of the font used (well, let's stick to readable fonts, not Wingdings). Different trashcan icons take precious brain cycles away from important stuff in order to determine that said icon is, in fact, the trashcan on the MacOS 9.x desktop (or whatever your poison might be).
It's my desire to see all icons with a simple one-word description in place of the pictures. The extra level of indirection (recognize icon using pattern recognition->translate to appropriate schemata->trigger appropriate motor response) is really unnecessary.
Desktops may not look very pretty, but they'll sure as hell be more functional with icons replaced with "wordcons."
is an icon of an old single unit Macintosh computer with a smiley face showing on the screen. But why take my word for it when a picture is worth a thousand words
They should put a bomb icon on their web site to reflect their /.ing.
Miko O'Sullivan
So is she retired or in a different field or just not getting called on by the companies anymore?
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
You know what a Happy Mac is but don't know what 'hashing with buckets' means or what a b-tree does or what a two handed clock algorithm for freeing memory is all about. Do not tremble, Old One. Your many years of diligent study and hard work have been noted, and we promise that the Slashdot young will be brought to you after lunch for a nice, soothing na^H^Hstory.
Tell me again why we are supposed to care about this? There is only so much you can put on a 16x16 canvas.
Hire a doctor of fine arts to make graph paper doodles.
Free the troll twosday april one
Some of the best icons ever created were by Keith Ohlfs for NeXTstep. Amazing what he could pack into 64x64 2-bit greyscale pixels.
Check out his latest work at Pixelsight
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
Isn't that what titles/labels/tooltips are for? The benefit of the visual icon and a label for further clarification? Also. How does one write. "copy current selection to the clipboard then erase it from the screen" in 20x20 pixels? I'm sure others could think of longer winded phrases that have common corresponding icons.
you're the cause of so much wasted time (outside of /. ;)
I can store the collective works of Shakespeare in a 10 Mb zip file. The collective paintings of Michelangelo, scanned and compressed with zero data loss, would probably be 100 Gb at least.
And yet, the collective works of Susan Kare could probably be compressed down to 1 or 2 kilobytes. Talk about minimalism!
So instead of buying her flowers and sending her chocolates, you slashdot her server. What kind of thanks is this!?!
WTF is up with this? Can you not test your code in a sandbox? How long has slashcode been alpha? You'd think your uber-effective counter trolling code straight by now.
Maybe now that her site is feeling the power of the geek, she'll feel inspired to make an icon for the fabled slashdot effect to commemorate the tormenting of her poor webserver.
Did she do the mushroom too?
I remember making Mac icons myself. One of the most interesting/exploitable things about early Mac icons was that they were somewhat viral. If you instered a disk with an icon that the system didn't have, it would add it to the systems set of icons. Sometimes it would even replace an 'official' icon with the hacked one, but I never quite figured out when it would vs. wouldn't do this.
As an example, I was bored waiting for someone I carpooled with in college, so I started diddling around on one of the campus library computing lab's macs. Using resedit I changed the MacPaint icon to a rather x-rated female figure. (rather difficult to do well in 16x16 pixels, or whatever it was). About 6 months later one of my frat brother's younger sibling showed me "this neat icon that replaced the MacPaint icons at high school"... It was my icon!
When I had made it originaly I didn't know it would spread (bad pun), I expected it to just mess with the one library machine. Experimenting some more I discovered the icon capturing effect, but as I said I never figured out the complete set of rules.
Next week, I guess we'll be treated to an expose' on the dude who wrote Windows' auto-insert notification code?
I mean... we had to use some icons, and those icons had to be made by somebody, and it happened to be her. My guess is that it is most likely one of those "right place, right time" kind of things. I figure she was just the most adept (of the Mac developer team) at making icons moreso than it was a case of Steve Jobs ordaining "Find me the best iconographer on the planet!".
This is much like how people get famous in the music industry. Why did Britney Spears get famous while the thousands of similarly mediocre talent did not? Because, contrary to what Einstein asserted, God does play with dice, and some stuff is due to pure happenstance.
So, now she's parlayed that initial luck into a cult of personality. Good for her.
Now, for something truly interesting to do while we're at the site... how many people think that there was deliberate thought given to which icons you can get on the various bits of clothing that she sells on her site. Specifically, note the women's thong. Among other limitations, you cannot get a thong with:
- The dead fish
- The sushi roll
- The rolling dice (think STD's)
- The cherries
So... you gotta ask yourself, did the various icon/clothing combinations go through some deliberate "hidden meaning" censorship?
she's hot
Some folks may remember the happy mac actually winked at you during startup in one of the OS 8 versions. It was quickly yanked- Apple supposedly got a backlash(or feared one) from cultures/countries where winking is offensive; search on google and you'll find a ton of links about it.
Similarly, they yanked at one point the Chimes Of Death(doo wee do doooooo) that accompanied the dead-mac(and error code dump), usually caused by severe hardware or software problems during booting in older macs. It genuinely freaked people out(I know it scared the shit out of me the first time i heard it.)
Random trivia- most of the original Macintosh's ROM was taken up by a COLOR image of the Macintosh development team. My 660AV's ROM contained an image of the team(much larger) at a beachparty. It is so sad to see that easter eggs have pretty much been killed off for years now in apple hardware/software.
Curious- Did she design the Spinning Pizza of Death, in OS x?
Obligitory slashdotting joke: Her site could use the SPOD right about now :-)
Please help metamoderate.
Christ, what's with people who think every article on slashdot has to be something they're interested in? In the future, skip to the next article, don't whine about it. If everybody whined about articles they don't care about every story would have 100000 comments like this. No thanks.
moricons.dll
when do you think the last time that lady had sex?
Moof! Says the dogcow.
That's right, everything you needed to customize your computer's behavior, condensed into a single window 312x155 (roughly) pixels in size. What's more, all the functions are discoverable, neither instruction nor a help file is necessary to use it. It's perhaps one of the most brilliant examples of efficient information display ever realized on a personal computer, plus interactivity thrown in for good measure.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This Susan Kare chick is a MILF!
Results for GIS of "Susan Kare"
Icons are cool. I am glad computers have icons. They make them prettier and more functional. Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts on icons.
I notice she has designed icons for Netscape also.
since that's been incorrect for years. Of course, it will probably be replaced with a pyramid with a eye on top of it soon.
You mean moricons.dll?
I was disappointed that despite the file name, none of the icons depicted composer Ennio Morricons...
You don't get out enough.
You shouldn't reply to trolls. Usually they want to catch you in a not-really-thinking mood, and obviously they did for you. None of the things he mentioned are coding techniques; B-trees and hash buckets are data structures, and the two-handed clock he mentions is an algorithm. Thus his rather funny anti-Macintosh rant gets a reply from you that makes you look ignorant. That's irony.
to create a slashdotted icon?
Here's the right Google cache link
Too many zeros, not enough ones
Jesus of Nazareth did not die so we could enjoy eggs and chocolate bunnies!
Yeah, but it was a spiffy side-effect.
This is what Linux needs (i.e., gnome/kde) - some GOOD icons. I'm sorry, but the stuff that's being used now is crap. A mix of artsy, well drawn crap with crapy crap. This woman's icons both a) LOOK GOOD, and b) convey MEANING...
Let's politely (after the nasty slashdoting) ask her to whip some up for us. I'd paypal a few $'s for some nice, professional KDE icons, wouldn't you?
I'd have to disagree with you violently there. I can think of several examples: The cross. National flags. The gold-star sticker.
I'm not sure you can define the cross, or national flags, or other extremely common symbols as "art", unless you want to stretch stretching the definition to the point of absurdity... i.e. saying that "art" includes all human symbols and structures that can be represented visually. Is the symbol of a circle "art"? How about a white flag, or a crescent moon?
What distinguishes art from mere symbols? "Art" has to be copied faithfully to the original form. Susan Kane's icons appear, pixel for pixel, exactly as she created them. Their origin can be traced to a single, original source (the artist).
Symbols like the cross have been visually represented in millions of different forms by millions of people. The symbolic origin is obvious (crucifixion of Christ), but there is no such "artistic" origin. The cross is a symbol not because one brilliant artist invented it, but because it was a simple and obvious way to represent an event that was passed along through oral and written tradition.
US Marines killed 7 innocent women and children near Nayaf!!!!
Yes, I'm sure you won't see this news on the US media.
Archive.org link
http://www.kare.com/images/portfolio_2.gif
http://www.kare.com/images/portfolio_6.gif
etc...
Somewhat offtopic, and definitely the wrong site, but... I like the clean look of Win2k, with Appearance set to "Windows Classic". I'm running XP Pro now, and I despise the soft, blurry, fuzzy, pastel icons. I've done the easy adjustments MS allows, and found a package of ME icons that I use with Microangelo. Any links out there for going the rest of the way? In particular, the loudspeaker icon on the taskbar and the Control Panel icons are bugging me.
Why did the control panel icon from Win 3.0 look likes something ripped from from an Amiga? It had the Amiga's (original) logo colors, a large "A" and small computer with a built in keyboard.
Here's a picture
Her icon for "500 Internal Server Error" leaves much to be desired.
who says slashdot will not help you get laid?
It's more that you can recognise that icon again easily once you know what it does.
So, if I start a new program, should I then see:
a) Ten kazillion icons with no explaination ('cept MouseOver)
b) A minimalist program that'll use descriptive text names with icons, putting icons on a quickbar as they come under heavy use (with the optional drag&drop if I want it there myself)
Personally, I think icons are overrated compared to an alphabetically sorted lists and well thought out menus, even though I want a *few* icons. But heh, people are different.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
When you say,
Processing an icon takes another level of brain processing, another level of indirection
In heavily left-brained individuals, the icons can actually begin to lose their meaning due to reliance on the converse side of the brain. It works both ways, too; a heavily right-brained person will have much more trouble manipulating something like a pull-down menu than, say, the OS X Dock.
It's actually not very common either, to have a prevalence of one-sidedness (literal) to your brain that would work to impede the ability to derive meaning from both glyphs and word-shapes.
Having said that, icons are a well-proven visual tool that work extremely well most of the time, given proper usage, and there's bucketloads of information backing this up right through pre-history to your first carbon cave-scratchings.
It is possible that you don't see them this way. And, on another note, did you really think that all those little pictures in every single end-user operating system were just spurious fluff?
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Wouldn't it be interesting to learn that she designed the Windows 3.1 icons on Mac Paint? :)
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
wow, can you imagine just how much money she is probably going to make off of her online store today? that part of the site is fully operational, lol. cgi scripts that display her portfolio (icons she created) are dead through...
And no, implementing "skins" does not fix the problem.
Her icons are certainly ... er ... iconic but how many ways are there of rendering an 's' in 5x5 pixels? For that matter, same with a cursor or an arrow.
And now we're on this topic, I remember the Mac icons she made. Wasn't one of them the trashcan which deleted everything you dragged into it. Apart from the floppy disk.
* A million user thought bubbles all saying the same thing: Won't that delete my floppy disk? *
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
I also like the sunglasses-road-trip icon too. Ahh, memories. Anyone else have favorite icons from that dll?
ok, this is offtopic and I'm probably going to get flamed, but I really wanted to post something interesting here - my original submission to Slashdot got rejected (how this minimalist icon piece of rubbish got accepted instead I do not know...).
. html
Today, Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame - the slashdot editors don't seem to have heard of him) announced that he *will* be filming a remake of KING KONG, in New Zealand. Details are at
http://stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2371077a10,00
The coolest thing is the intention to build a replica of early 1900's New York in a farm paddock!
No it's not an April 1st Joke.
and said there was a misconfiguration. I wouldn't root her box to discover what was specifically wrong.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Does anyone know where I can find a downloadable sound sample of the "Chimes of Death"? I'm not a mac user and I'm interested in hearing them...
Moof!!!
Those in the know are aware of her best creation, Clarus the Dogcow!
I am skeptical. Consider Japanese ideographs, which are essentially icons. I've seen the same book written in english, and written in Japanese ideographs. The english text version is smaller and uses less paper. Plus, there's no way to look up an icon in a dictionary, there's no way to sort by icon, etc.
This is how MCSEs and suchlike happen - people who aren't real geeks and have no idea what's really going on, are taught to "click here, then here, then there" so when the icon moves, they're lost. Knowing what a btree is is just a part of "getting it" that anyone should have if they are let loose with powerful tools.
I wouldn't hire someone like Taco for anything either. Not knowing the difference between "their" and "they're" is just unacceptable, even if he didn't NEED to know and/or had spell checkers at his disposal. It'd be like showing up to the interview in board shorts, sandals, and a loud shirt... it may not affect one's actual job performance, but if the candidate can't even put in minimal effort, what am I expected to think?
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
The spinning pizza/beachball/whatever, is NOT that.
It's a spinning NeXT optical disc drive disc!!!!
Really, get with it.
n.
1. One who advocates a moderate or conservative approach, action, or policy, as in a political or governmental organization.
2. A practitioner of minimalism.
adj.
1. Of, relating to, characteristic of, or in the style of minimalism.
2. Being or providing a bare minimum of what is necessary.
There was a while that my work PC had this as its Windows Wallpaper icon - "Hey, what am I doing on this piece of Intel hardware? :-(".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Please report yourself to the Justice Department immediately.
-John Ashcroft
Sorry, but it needs to be done.
Saddam's the disease, we're the cure.
The "spinning pizza of death" actually originated as a graphical representation of the original NeXT hardware's only winchester-esque drive: the magnet-optical. The alternating black and white slices of the disc were meant to represent reflections on the mirror surface of the disc. (These drives were rather slow, particularly so when writing, due to the two-stage Curie Point process. If the NeXT was waiting for something, it was probably a write to finish, thus the cursor.)
Upon the release of color NeXT hardware, NeXTStep 2.x 'colorized' the disc cursor. This had the side-effect of removing it by a degree from the original visual metaphor.
OS X 1.1 and below had the same, colorized cursor, often referred to as the "spinning beach ball" due to the coloration. 10.2 Aqua-fied the icon, so it now looks... sort of like a gummi something.
(Mac OS 8 and above had their own version of the "spinning beach ball", but that originiated IIRC in HyperCard as a cursor for when the program was busy. I don't believe it was ever colorized - and it was black and white quarters of a circle, unlike the 2-bit (4 grey) NeXTStep optical disc cursor. This cursor is superficially similar to, but as the above narrative describes, historically separate from, the NeXT-derived OS X cursor.)
The one with the bomb icon on it. I don't wear it at airports.
My brother once over-packed a suitcase. He had to sit on it to get it to close. At the airport a guard asked, "Is it okay if I open it up?". My brother quickly said, "No, it will explode!", meaning that it was overpacked and had to be opened with great care.
However, that is not how the guard interpreted it, and got all panicky and called in reinforcements. Gotta be careful with your slang around there.
Table-ized A.I.
Ah, but how do you read? Most people read, after a point, mostly by the shape of the word first, not the actual letters. That is, look at the shape of the word letter. It's mostly rectangular, with a small ascender at the front, and a pair of ascenders in the middle. The ascenders (ltf, etc) and descenders (ygpq, etc.) serve as a first line of reading, to narrow down the possible words before you even recognize the letters involved.
This is why ALL CAPS is annoying to read. Since all the words are all ascenders, no descenders. You have to slowly read the entire word.
As for levels of indirection, one could just as easily have (recognize letters/shape using pattern recognition->translate to appropriate schemata->trigger appropriate motor response) or worse.
When I upgraded Mac OS X, to version 10.2, I was deeply saddened to find that it no longer displays the "happy mac" when booting, but rather that it was replaced by a more "elegant" apple silhouette and a radial throbber.
Do you think the apple hipsters thought the "happy mac" was a little tacky, or just "dated"? Granted, the icon is of a happy mac classic, but I could easily see it replaced by a "happy flat-panel iMac" or even better, a "happy G3 powerbook" (like mine is).
There were no images of the dev team in the original 64K ROM's. Just the boot code and all the Manager, minus the Packages and SANE, which were in the System File.
You are thinking of the 128K ROMS.
Totally Pointless Trivia Point #1265
I like the Klingon-esque red triangle. I actually released a shareware application with that icon in my VB 3.0 days. :)
It's the MS-DOS logo being "drawn." The "burned" part is sketched lines.
This is important stuff to know!
... usually caused by SCSI chain problems (lets be more precise ...) ... who can forget the sheer dread of a SCSI chain failure. which device isn't working? those connectors were physically painful to mess with after a while... the cables sometimes didn't work, gotta keep swapping cables and restarting to see what happens ... people put bad cables back on the rack ...
yup, those were the bad old days
bondi blue forever!
simon
home page
The symbolic origin of the cross is surely not only Christian, unless sssmashy means "*The* Cross" with capitals and all that ... is this what you mean sssmashy? - as adopted by Christian countries for their flags? otherwise I'd say crosses probably belong to universal vocabulary of basic symbols like circles, dots, zig zags... I remember how blown away I was when I found a design I'd always thought of as very celtic (Scots /Irish) cropping up in some African designs. My little theory (and I'd love it if more enlightened people could suggest further readings) is that there are a basic number of ways the human hand moves and strong images to copy, so the same shapes and symbols are going to be pretty universal.
http://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/ This has more than you'd ever want to know about the Mac easter eggs and sounds... Scroll down to "computer hardware eggs" to hear the system sounds.
This page:
http://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/HW-840AV.html
has the images of the beach party and boat.
cheers
front
Check this out: http://kare.com/images/portfolio_14.gif.
I highly recommend the book "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud. Actually it is not a book but a graphic novel, except it is not a novel since it is non-fiction.
It is very well written and is one of the few books that I think EVERYBODY should read (even if you aren't into graphic novels/comics).
John
damn, I'm feeding a troll, aren't I?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I also like the sunglasses-road-trip icon too. Ahh, memories. Anyone else have favorite icons from that dll?
I was always fond of the macguyver style swiss army knife icon. The foxpro fox icon worked well for games too assuming you weren't using fox pro on the system.
I've got a PowerMac 8100 that occupies a position of power in the garage with its 21 inch Apple monitor on a heavy duty shelf. I tend to start it and walk back into the kitchen during its approximately 2 minute long bootup sequence.
The 8100 bootup crash sound is a sound sample of brakes screeching followed by a loud crash of vehicle into something immobile. I ran into the garage when I heard that sound a year ago thinking that a car had crashed through my garage door. Yikes! It was just the CMOS battery that had run low which triggered it, and I rebooted it and figured out that it was the Mac that crashed, replaced the battery a week later and I haven't heard that sound since.
Now that's an easter egg. BTW, if you have an old Mac 512k, take it apart and look on the inside of the shell casing: you'll find the signatures of the Mac development team in it.
Aye, there's the rub. Making small symbols distinguishable is important, but I don't know any easy-to-follow rules on how to do it. I haven't heard about the effect of amount of visual arc before, but I am still wary of using color (without redundant indicators), because you can very easily make things confusing for people who are colorblind. I've read some of Tufte's stuff on color, and I'm starting to think it's often used inappropriately: for example to indicate ordering by hue, when there's really no natural ordering to it. (ROYGBIV, of course, but that is not an internalized, intuitive ordering for most people. using brightness/darkness might work ok.) I've seen people use color to indicate magnitude, and that's not the greatest idea because a linear increase in, say, the amount of green or saturation or brightness, isn't going to be perceived linearly. You'd have to use a perceptual color space like CIELAB of CIECAM... and most designers and engineers aren't color vision nerds enough to do it. I'm not saying you can't do very good things with color -- you certainly can. But it's hard, while it's very easy to do bad things with color.
There's a lot of sciency cognitive psych knowledge required to do truly good User Interface design (of which icon design is a subset, I suppose). Unfortunately, there is no unified science of UI design, and most of us are stumbling around half-blind and just doing the best we can.
Sorry this is a bit off-topic. But, kris lang, i'd love to know a bit more about CIELAB and stuff, because I've forgotten most of what I learned about it. If you get a chance, can you send some references my way? (my yahoo messaging id is available in my user info i think.)
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