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Classic Mac Icons Archive Bought By MOMA
mikejuk writes Susan Kare is the artist responsible for many of the classic Mac icons that are universally recognized. Now her impact as a pioneering and influential computer iconographer has been recognized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She designed all of her early icons on graph paper, with one square representing each pixel. Now this archive of sketches has been acquired by MoMA, jointly with San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, and has gone on show as part of a new exhibition, This is for Everyone: Design Experiments For The Common Good. So now you can think of the smiling Mac, the pointing finger and scissors as high art.
Those are the icons I most associate with the Mac. High art, maybe not, but definitely the icons I faced the most frequently.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I never owned a Mac, classic or otherwise. I did, however, own an Apple //e. The Mac icons were so well designed, I found some Macintosh sales literature and was able to duplicate the icons using some Apple // drawing programs. The most notable was the Trash Can.
These icons deserve to be preserved.
Last I heard they were warehoused by Steve.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Fun Fact: Susan Kare also designed many of the icons used in early versions of OS/2, as well as Windows 3.0. Basically the entirety of popular early GUI computing was designed by her.
So also did the graphic design of Solitaire that was included with Windows through XP (though I think XP redesigned the card backs), so her work might be the most seen graphic design in computing history.
You are just asking for a Goatse link, right?
Have gnu, will travel.
Nah . Thats Potterings logo
I definitely won't be giving your parents credit for bringing you into this world.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Never mind the beach ball, what about Clarus?
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
MOOOF!
Especially the new look here which mimicks old in the latest build.
http://saveie6.com/
and anyhow, I am more interested i the design and standardization of street signs.
I have used Macs since they existed, and I never once saw the Sad Mac, aside from looking it up, or seeing it in documentation. The spinning beach ball was also exceptionally rare until OS X came along, now you do see that one occasionally.
On "IBM machines" AKA DOS machines , I have seen xxx failed, Abort, Retry, Fail? almost incessantly. Not artistic, not particular memorable, aside from being drilled into one's head like "Polly Want a Cracker?" is for parrots.
My favorite to this day is still "Error: keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue."
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She likely had a Lisa to work with for development, the icons in that UI were abysmal and it's hard to tote around a $10K / 40lb desktop machine when the muse visits. Many artists to this day still work with paper. Shocking, I know.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Because we're talking about a decent, enduring bit of iconography, as opposed to the abysmal set that the Xerox system used http://toastytech.com/guis/gvs...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Yeah sure, waste your money on a solid gold watch that's going to be obsolete in a year.
Of course, the computer is totally encapsulated so we may be able to just upgrade that part alone. It would allow for upgrades at a lower price and a lower environmental cost.
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From TFA: "She began by sketching arrows, paintbrushes, and pointing hands in a notebook because the application for designing icons on screen hadn’t been coded yet. These casual prototypes of the new, user-friendly face of computing were initially drawn with a pencil on graph paper, each square representing a pixel."
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The Lisa's rectangular pixels would have made the design process problematic.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
There is a file named "Tiny Icons Work" on that Xerox screenshot, did anyone look in there?
The SPOD is from NeXTSTep. I remember seeing it often when using the old magnesium cube.
I used to see the sad Mac icon about twice a day on average. Early 90's trying to use Photoshop. We would restart at least twice during the day.
I have used Macs since they existed, and I never once saw the Sad Mac, aside from looking it up, or seeing it in documentation.
I've seen it twice (outside of documentation, as you say)
Once while learning how to code finder extensions in pascal - poorly.
Another when the MB wasn't in a case and I accidentally dropped a couple HD screws out of my hand directly onto the MB.
Obviously both cases were my own doing and 'my fault', but I remember being pretty proud at the time seeing something so rare most people didn't know what that icon even meant.
The spinning beach ball was also exceptionally rare until OS X came along, now you do see that one occasionally.
I don't remember OS 9 too well, but wasn't the spinning beach ball a new introduction of OS X 10.0? Along with most of the candy style widgets?
In OS 8 I clearly remember the only 'wait' cursor was the wrist watch that always said 3 PM, and had no color in it.
But I admit it was some time ago now
It took some time for the primary/secondary school system I grew up in to raise enough money to buy some macs (as an upgrade to our multiple labs of Apple IIGS systems). You can imagine what a bunch of kids would do to a lab of Mac LC systems. The sad Mac was something that was almost constantly displayed somewhere in that lab.
We'd enter the lab imitating the Monty Python line "what's brown and sounds like a bell?" before hitting the power button to start up the macs, and then wait to see who the lucky one was who sat down at a mac that wouldn't boot up.
Right. Forgot that hideous detail.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Making them smaller doesn't make them less ugly. I hope "Tiny Icons Work" is a descriptor and not a complete sentence.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The original Mac didn't have a spinning anything. Animated cursors were something you had to write the code for yourself if you wanted them - involving messy and tricky vertical refresh interrupt handlers if I recall correctly. Later versions of the classic Mac added colour cursors, but no standard support for animation (though there was a standard resource type for a series of cursor animation frames, just nothing as standard that understood it - rather odd really, I'm guessing that was a MacApp (Apple's Application framework) thing).
Mac OS X introduced the "spinning pizza of death", I think inherited from NeXTSTEP. But a lot of people misunderstand what it is. It's not an indication of a crash, it's an indication that the main run loop has been executing user code for longer than a preset interval. In other words, the run loop has to be entered often enough to stop the system automatically showing the SPOD - a bit like how a watchdog works in embedded systems. So if your code takes too long or hangs, you see the SPOD.
AFAIK she also designed the OS/2 Warp icons. !!
Its a riot how they claim iWatch is the first time (evah!) that an entire computer system has been put onto a single chip. Do they suck all the air out of the part of the building marketing works in? Is that why nobody from the real world reviews their marketing copy?
Probably as a picture of a black-and-white Macintosh with a "D" on the screen.
The Lisa's rectangular pixels would have made the design process problematic.
Not if the icon design tool compensates for the problem. For example, the IBM EGA monitor fit 640x350 pixels into a 4:3 frame, giving each pixel a roughly 3:4 shape. Drawing zoomed-in pixels as 8x6 rectangles would have produced a very nearly square pixel aspect ratio. Likewise, the Lisa monitor fit 720x360 pixels into a 4:3 frame, giving each pixel a 2:3 shape. A 9x6 rectangle would have appeared as a square. When Apple turned the Lisa into the "Macintosh XL" in 1985, it reengineered the video with 608x431 square pixels. (source)
Boy I sure did. And it is a sad moment. I also once knocked the back end of the CRT while adding RAM to a "toaster" Mac, and the hissing sound of air rushing into it was a *really* saddening sound.
Everyone knows they were handed down from on high to The Steve on stone tab^WiPads.
Take a good look at those Xerox icons. You won't find a hand, pair of scissors, floppy disk, bomb, etc. etc. Not to mention the Star icons were 72x72, and Susan Kare had to fit her icons into 32x32.
I believe in giving credit, but only where it's due.
yes, I'm sure she worked in complete isolation, and developed everything by herself.
I'm tired to see these bullshit articles. Like the other one of that supposed astronaut woman who had so many cessna hours she DESERVED to be in space but wasn't because patriarchy.
I'd say I'm horrified but slashdot has fallen so low it sometimes makes reddit seem like a source for news.
Note: I copied this from a post in the /. article about astronomer Henrietta Leavitt. It's just as applicable here as there, so why not bring it over?
The original Mac didn't have a spinning anything. Animated cursors were something you had to write the code for yourself if you wanted them - involving messy and tricky vertical refresh interrupt handlers if I recall correctly. Later versions of the classic Mac added colour cursors, but no standard support for animation (though there was a standard resource type for a series of cursor animation frames, just nothing as standard that understood it - rather odd really, I'm guessing that was a MacApp (Apple's Application framework) thing).
It wasn't part of the original Mac, but animated cursors (including the SpinCursor procedure) were added to the Cursor Utilities in QuickDraw, I think fairly early.
I also used Macs from way back, when they were way way expensive, and yet the keyboards I had never had any F1- F12 keys.. You would think for what they charged they could have included that, along with a second mouse button. Also, I absolutely , still to this day, just love Susan's icons. I can't explain why they project such a friendly aura, but they do.
I used to see the sad Mac icon about twice a day on average. Early 90's trying to use Photoshop. We would restart at least twice during the day.
You shouldn't have. Are you sure that wasn't the bomb icon?
The Sad Mac was generally a sign of a hardware failure, especially a bad POST on boot, not a routine application crash. Application crashes would usually give you the cartoon bomb with fuse. (And those crashes were routine back then, certainly.)
The progress cursor.. the watch, was animated... the hands went round and round until the process was completed, or the mac froze up.
She likely had a Lisa to work with for development, the icons in that UI were abysmal and it's hard to tote around a $10K / 40lb desktop machine when the muse visits. Many artists to this day still work with paper. Shocking, I know.
Thought she used paper and pencil for development. Never got NEAR a computer until she was ready to scan them in..
How far back does your Mac use go? I got my first Mac when I was 13 (an LC III) in 1993. I saw the sad Mac icon more than zero times but not a heck of a lot of times. The spinning black-and-white icon, though, I saw all the freaking time. As far as I know, it wasn't called a Beach Ball until it was colorized with Mac OS X.
Yeah. I think I saw the Sad Mac after one too many adventures with ResEdit.
The circular black-and-white precursor to today's colorized Beach Ball cursor wasn't animated? In my memory it was but gosh maybe my memory is wrong. The watch definitely had spinning hands, though.
Probably because they didn't make the Mac icons, so they don't deserve credit. But, hey, this is a free country so you are allowed to misattribute credit to anyone you want to.
I still have all of the original Inside Macintosh manuals and SpinCursor isn't a system API listed in any of them - that's up to volume VI which covered System 7. I don't have the later reorganised Inside Macintosh that was 'horizontally ' organised rather than the 'vertically' organised original series. SpinCursor() rings a vague bell though, maybe it was something that came in with System 7.1 or later.
I do know that while the spinning watch hands and 'target' cursors were commonly seen pre-System 7, you had to roll your own solution using either a vertical interrupt handler or simply periodically going to a new cursor frame. It's likely that the code for doing that was widely shared and copied among developers and it could well have been called SpinCursor(). Since System 7 was cutting edge in 1990, hopefully if my memory has gone a bit dim on the complete API it offered I'll be forgiven.
I thought that video would link to the infamous Tech Note 31, but it doesn't.
"There is a life-size picture of a dogcow conveniently located in the Finder. Look under 'Page Setup...' Now look under 'Options.' Walla [sic], there is the dogcow in all it's raging glory.
"Like any talented dog, it can do flips. Like any talented cow, it can do precision bitmap alignment."
Yeah, the wristwatch was in classic Mac OS, the hourglass in Windows, and the beach ball (pinwheel?) in Mac OS X.
I definitely preferred the wristwatch. When I saw it pop up, my mental note was "this operation may take a while."
When I see the beach ball, my mental note is "this program is about to freeze up/crash."
The Mac's lack of function keys or a second mouse button weren't cost-saving measures. They were design choices to make the machine simpler for the average user. Argue whether that's right or wrong, it was deliberate.
Also, Macs were never intended to compete on price. They weren't terribly expensive compared to the IBM-PC AT, which cost $4000 with no hard drive or video card, and couldn't do a lot of things the Mac could do. It's only because PC clones got so cheap that Macs were relatively expensive... and a lot of those clone makers went under due to razor-thin margins.
Steve Jobs clarified Apple's mission when he returned in 1997: "to provide relevant, compelling solutions that customers can get only from Apple."