In old sepia-toned photographs, the world is a cool, relaxed, elegant place. Men wear hats, women wear stern expressions, and children don’t appear.

In this tradition, Scott Copeland has created a subtle and tasteful desktop icon set. I want to curl up and nap inside them, far away from the improbably futuristic-sounding “21st century”.

Enough prattle, let’s look at the icons:

Lean in close. No one’s looking at you, lean in. Closer. Look in the top row at the drive and movie reel, and the entire bottom row. See it? There’s a subtle tilde-shaped highlight that curves across each icon from the middle left to high on the right. It’s an almost-invisible recurring note that unifies the most dissimilar section of this set, and Copeland’s smart enough not to force it onto the icons it wouldn’t work on.

The folders have a subtle transparency and, best of all, don’t simply stamp other icons on top of a generic folder icon. Look at the picture folder: it uses the picture icon, but instead of being resized and pasted it’s tilted and shadowed to lean against the folder. It has an unhurried depth.

File icons are the bane of every desktop icon set: they need to look similar without being identical, and it’s especially hard with a restricted palette like this. Chakram includes plenty of variations on the above icons by replacing the extension on the icon. I really like the way the .psd icon integrated the picture icon with the old Photoshop icon.

There are a few application replacement icons, and these are the only place the set goes wrong. The Dashboard and Safari icons (first and fourth from left) are just flat, the Firefox icon (third from left) is saccharine. The Photoshop icon (rightmost) feels indecisive, stuck between the old CS2 feather and the abstract CS3 tile. It stands out as the only icon in the set with an arbitrary border (a modern relic), the other icons are real objects with weight.

You can download the set (click the “monitor” icon on the left) or visit Copeland’s website.