Here in Chicago, the weather tends to be a bit mean. “Oh, sure, it’s May and it was just 75… now let’s have a week with a high of 50. What? It’s finally time for summer? OK, we’ll spend the next few weeks over 100.” It would be nice to just run away and lay [...]

Jess (very softly, while dreaming)
I can’t see it.
Peter
What can’t you see?
Jess
monster…
Peter
What kind of monster?
Jess
Mmm… bike.

This icon set is odd enough to live up to its name and, like Sci-Fi, unifies the diverse icons with color. More than the Sci-Fi set, they’re also alike in shape. The loose, hand-drawn feel is a nice change from the [...]

Peter
It’s kind of amazing how stupid babies are.
Jess
You’re really weird.
Peter
I’m secretly an alien.
Jess
Secretly?

I guess that cat was already out of the bag. I know I’m three feet tall, green, and bug-eyed, but I have a really good explanation for that. So it must have been the icons that gave me away:
Each icon is [...]

I would not say that my household is looking forward to the final Harry Potter book, in the same way I would not say that the Pacific ocean is damp. The sheer volume of understatement would fill… at least a large thimble.

When I talked about the Armory and Fruits icon sets, I criticized both for [...]

I think if modern jobs involved charging across a battlefield to smash someone’s skull in with an oversized cleaver, Ikea would be selling flat-packing shields made of aluminum and plywood. They’d collapse into kindling at the lightest blow, but you could get four and a hotdog for $20.

This icon set imagines the reverse of that [...]

If you can’t get away on a safari, get to the zoo. And if you can’t get to the zoo, get icons.

Awww yeah, big heads and beady eyes always equal cute.
I’ve talked a lot about consistency in icon sets, so it’s nice to see a set of icons where every icon is very different and [...]

Windows died. Windows dieded a lot. And now we have spooky ghost icons haunting the desktop. If you’re goth, emo, or trying not to run down your laptop battery, these mostly-transparent icons will look quite smart on a dark background.

The first thing that jumps out at me is the inconsistent perspective. The hard drive is [...]

Today’s icons have an odd size: 16×11 pixels. That’s because flags themselves have a long history of odd sizing. Nowadays they’re mostly 3:2 or 5:3, but there are odder ratios like 19:10 (US flags), 37:28 (Denmark), and 15:13 (Belgium) — to say nothing of Nepal, who I can only guess are deliberately trying to make [...]

You’re busy. You hurried to the office. You had a coffee, maybe a fancy one from Starbucks. You are high-powered and arghtrafficIcan’tbelieveitwhytodaywhywhy?
Yes, too much coffee, not enough nummy food. Let’s back up and start your day off right.

Yummy fruit icons from Whole Foods — no, wait, from Dirceu Jos Veiga. They’re free for personal use.
I [...]

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like [...]