Icon O'Clock

Beach Icons

2008-03-08T02:10:14Z

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 on the beach for a while.

Beach Icons are available for Linux, Windows, and OS X. By Dirceu Veiga.

Fantastic Dream

2008-03-08T02:10:10Z

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 angular precision of most icon sets.

The folders, drives, and files are quite abstract. I think it works for the folders and drives: you’ll see a zillion of the default folder and a handful of special ones, so they’ll be easy to remember. Likewise with drives: unless you’re some kind of anime addict, you only have a handful of drives and they’re easy to keep straight.

I don’t like the file icons. They have wonderful designs and patterns, but the border on them is very heavy, and it’d be hard to skim through a directory and remember the fish means .mp3 to pick them out. But realize I’m criticizing a dream for not making much sense, and this objection vanishes.

Fantastic Dream is available for personal use on Linux, Windows, and OS X. By Rokey.

Sci-Fi: Spookily Ominous or Ominously Spooky?

2008-03-08T02:10:04Z

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 so different, connected by the sci-fi theme rather than design similarity. Still, it looks like the artists took pains to have similar rich colors for each icon. The color of the folders matches the color of the alien skin and all the icons have deep shadows. The cow is even more gray than white.

Sci-Fi icons by Rhandros Dembicki available for Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Harry Potter and Windows XP

2008-03-08T02:09:59Z

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 being muddled at small sizes because the vector art was resized without being touched up. This icon set, however, is a perfect example of attention to detail at smaller sizes. Each of the 16×16 icons is redrawn to better fit the space. I especially like that the Hedwig icon (that’s the owl, if there’s something terribly wrong with you and you haven’t yet read the books) doesn’t just flatten perspective to try to fit, it’s a complete redraw.

The Harry Potter and Windows XP icons are available for Windows and Linux, free for non-commercial use. By Iconka.

Armory: Shields from Ikea

2008-03-08T02:09:56Z

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 situation: if medieval craftsmen made shields now, they’d have machine-stamped creased edges and shiny gradients everywhere.

These icons are nicely varied and have good colors, but they suffer badly from being created as vector art. They look decent at 128px, but at any smaller size they’re completely muddled. There was apparently no attempt made to touch them up.

Still… shields are kickass. If you don’t get this, you were probably never a prepubescent boy. I don’t know why you didn’t choose to be one and I’m sure it’s turned out wonderful, but I’d rather have shields. They’re kickass, you know.

Armory is available for Windows and OS X for personal use. By Steven W. Smith.

Togozoo: Big Heads and No Colors

2008-03-08T02:09:51Z

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 yet they’re beautiful as a whole. The best part of this icon set is the way it demonstrates that shape matters. You can tell them apart or pick one out of a crowded desktop with just a glance even though they don’t use color.

Available for Windows and OS X. By Agus Wijaya.

Ghost System: Hauntingly Nice

2008-03-08T02:09:47Z

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 tilted down so we see more of its top than the folder (which, oddly, is facing away from us). We can see even more of the top of the recycle bin. Because the different icons have such radically different shapes, they’re presented at different angles. It’s fine for a tiny set like this, but in a larger set meant for complete desktop replacement, it would be jarring to see tens of icons facing different directions.

The second thing that jumps out at me is that Mexico is missing from the web icon (the globe). I’ll chalk up the turned-away folder and the floating paper to artistic license, but the globe should be accurate or not recognizably Earth, as is the case with the Firefox icon.

Minor gripes aside, I love the way the transparency is used on the hard drive, it’s the best of the five. Maybe it’s only that I get to feel like I have Superman’s x-ray vision.

The five icons are were created by Bombia Design and are free for personal use and redistribution on Windows or OS X.

Flags: A little bit of patriotism

2008-03-08T02:09:41Z

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 life difficult.

Unlike yesterday’s icons, these show a maniacal attention to detail. Every pixel is precisely placed to evoke the detail that would be too tiny to see otherwise:

You can also see that each flag has a one-pixel border created by darkening the edges of the flag. Putting a black border around each flag would have overwhelmed them at this tiny size, but darkening the edge of the flag itself tricks the human eye into seeing one. It’s as if there’s a fine border we can’t quite make out. The bottom and right edges are darkened more heavily than the top and left edges, and suddenly the flag is a real object that’s juuuust casting a shadow.

The flag icons were created by Mark James and are free for any use without attribution.

Fruits: Who’s Hungry?

2008-03-08T02:09:37Z

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 was all set to gripe about the way that the light source comes from all different sides on these (the light is below the strawberry?) but it keeps them from being repetitive and makes them all kinds of cute. So I’ll gripe about something else.

The fruits were done as vector art and resized without human attention. The 32×32 and 16×16 icons are muddled, they’ve lost all definition. The strawberry is is especially bad.

CISTM: Cinematically Futuristic

2008-03-08T02:09:34Z

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 city lights, receding…
Neuromancer, by William Gibson

Hands up: who wants to go swimming in a sea of data, a neon-and-chrome promise of limitless potential? Exactly. Who doesn’t? Besides the Amish, I mean.

Until then, we’ll have to content ourselves to dream of math and networks. Movies and anime have beautiful interface mockups, and I thought of them when I saw the icon set CISTM:

They may not be obvious but dang are they pretty. Similar to Chakram there’s a highlight that unifies all the icons and, (insert squeal of delight) it’s cut out around the different shapes to keep from disrupting their forms.

Across the top are Desktop (bland), My Computer (delightfully echoing the Mac SE faceplate), two hard drive icons, and an empty and full trash can. The trash cans could’ve been better: on the empty, move the line down so it’s sort of the opposite of the hard drive; on the full, expand the line up into a rounded rectangle to fill the icon.

On the second row are floppy, disc, printer, and camera. To keep the overall shape interesting, the first four aren’t just a mirror image of the desktop and computer icons. The corner cut out of the lower-right is at the inverse angle, a variation keeping the harmony of the icons.

The network icon is inspired, it literally connects many nodes into a larger whole. It works for me in a way that makes me want to run out and get it tattood somewhere conspicuous. The other networking icons are Internet, shortcut, and mail.

The folders and files are straightforward variations on the established themes, though with the text file they start down a dangerously slippery slope from abstraction into representation. If this keeps up, they could even become practical!

The creator of CISTM cites TAKMEK 3 as an influence, and it’s obvious to see in the colors and some of the linework. But where TAKMEK 3 is repetitive (ugly bevels!) and almost completely abstract, CISTM is suggestive. There are distinctive shapes that invite you to imagine uses. Perhaps the control panel for a death ray.

Download the ZIP now to live the dream. If you visit the set’s homepage, ignore all the talk about open source: they’re not, commercial use is prohibited.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go watch Johnny Mnemonic, read Snow Crash, and wear wraparound sunglasses. In cyberspace.