Free the Icons: A Look Back at Classic Mac App Design
Old Icons
Inspired by the 'Free the Icons' movement, I reflect on Apple's 50th anniversary and the early days of the Mac. Back then, icons were tiny 32x32 black-and-white images, often featuring tilted rectangles and hands to distinguish apps from documents. From MacWrite to THINK Pascal, these constrained designs established a whimsical visual language that eventually evolved as users became more familiar with the interface.
This is what old-timers mean when they talk about Apple and whimsy.
- krige
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.
- dvh
You are using font size wrong. I see 13 lines of text per page and most lines has single word on it.
The solution is simple. If you don't know correct font size of every visitor, don't change the font size. Each visitor will have font set according to their preference. I will have set it to medium, my grandma to xx-large, teenager with perfect vision to small, designer with 8k monitors to 150px helvetica.
If you want to retain some control over the font size, use small, medium, large. (e.g. information dense site could use small, average website like yours could use medium, and information sparse websites like wedding announcement could use large).
- pelagicAustral
Is there any online collection of icons of the Windows 95 through to 2000/Millenium era? I miss a lot of them very dearly.
- devindotcom
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.
- ofalkaed
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.