Photoshop CS

Friday 27 February, 2004 19.37

When Adobe released its latest upgrade to its ubiquitous Photoshop suite of applications, I was once again surprised to see them using only the blandest of icons rather than leveraging their image.  I like icons made by applications to be instantly recognizable as created by them, and figured I'd have to rectify the situation myself, just as with version 7.  So here you go.  It wasn't easy; even the new splash screen (from which I took the imagery), is somewhat bland.  But hey, you work with what you get.

Earth

Monday 09 July, 2003 20.23

That damned globe!  :-)  That dang desktop has proven to be insanely popular, and despite my stated disdain for globe icons, I've reproduced (and tweaked), it here as an icon.  Crow, anyone?  Geographical features seem pointless at 128 pixels, so I've replaced them with a nice dark green.  Not sure how useful it is, but hey, you ask, and I obey.

You can also find it in use as the icon of the nifty little geography application World of Where.  I do not normally allow my work to be used for commercial purposes, but World of Where dovetails nicely with my own pet obsession concerning education and geography, and in this case, I was more than happy to allow it to be used.

Photoshop 7.0

Friday 25 April, 2003 13.34

Photoshop 7.0 is finally out, with very welcome support for OS X.  It works beautifully.  But one thing I couldn't understand was why the default icons for the various document formats were so...well...bland.   Not any longer.  This is the most ambitious yet collection of icons released by the Graphics Factory, 14 in all.  Unlike our first set, this one offers replacements for all the supported document formats.

This was also our first OS X only release.  It wasn't a deliberate snubbing of OS 9, but more of an acceptance of reality.  OS X is the future of the Macintosh, like it or not, and besides, these icons really only come into their own if viewed at a size larger than 32x32.  Basic replacement instructions are included with the icons.

Stamps

Wednesday 26 March, 2003 21.40

This release isn't exactly Mac-oriented, though it does take advantage of Mac OS X's large icon format.  It started a couple of weeks ago when I was hunting the web for images of stamps.  Bored with the Graphics Factory's standard eMail icon, I wanted something a bit more unusual.  Well, I found what I was looking for, in addition to a whole slew of stamp pictures which weren't quite what was needed.  Rather than let them go to waste, I figured I'd whip out a set of icons based on the best images.

There are six icons in the set.  Five are of American stamps from the 1930s-1940s.  The sixth is German, and appears to be from the 1930s, though there is no date.

I'm not sure how useful these will be, but enjoy them anyway!

Macromedia DreamWeaver

Sunday 21 July, 2002 1633

How a company so concerned with graphics can release such butt-ugly icons for their applications, I'll never know.  Macromedia does a wonderful job with their apps (this site is put together with Dreamweaver), but they always seem to fall down on the job when it comes to designing the major element   that people associate with their applications.  Case in point:  Dreamweaver MX.  OS X now has an industrial-strength HTML code writing editor, and Macromedia represents it with one of the flattest icons I've yet seen for X, one with a distinctly Windows feel to it.  You'd think they'd have gotten the hang of OS X's large format icons.

Now I'm not normally one for the globe icons that are so popular for OS X; I think they are terribly repetitive, and are showing a distinct lack of creativity.  That's why you won't generally see them here.  They're just too easy to make.  (Create a circle, slap on a couple of specular highlights, insert element x, and voila!)  This time I'm making an exception however, mainly because Macromedia chose to use a round icon, and all I wanted to do was reinterpret the original into one a little more suited for Mac OS X.

So there you go:  Macalicious' contribution to spherical icons. :–)  Also included are replacements for the default document icons, in both blue and green.

ImageReady 7.0

Thursday 23 May, 2002, 19.22

The ImageReady 7.0 document icon replacements are now available from the Graphics Factory.  They're an even heftier download than the PS 7 icons, coming in at a (for us), whopping 1 megabyte in size.  Now you can have document icons created with the same flavor for both Photoshop, and ImageReady.  Like the previous replacement set, these are for OS X only, and come with basic replacement instructions.

iTools

Wednesday 20 February, 2002, 20.43

Customized icons are more important than ever in OS X, since the Dock doesn't do the best job in the world differentiating between minimized folders.   Hope you find it useful.

FireWorks & Flash

Friday 02 January, 2002, 13.48

Here's a few icons I've had bouncing around the hard drive ever since producing the Dreamweaver icon replacements available in the icons sections of the site.  Never did get around to releasing them until now, though I'm not sure why.  Maybe it's because I rarely use them, having little interest in Flash, and having cut my teeth on Photoshop.  But they are undeniably popular applications, and the Dreamweaver replacements have proved to be so regularly downloaded, that I figured I might as well post these to the site as well.

Hope you find them useful.

Home Directory

Sunday 11 November, 2001 20.08

OS X is amazing. There's no other word for it. I hopped on board back with the public beta, and haven't looked back. The power, the stability, and, I must admit, the eye candy, all combine to make me not the least bit sorry to see the crash-prone old OS get tossed out the window. As Neal Stephenson said of it, the Classic Mac OS can't "walk and chew gum at the same time."

Now it can.

Having said that, however, there are a few little things which bug me. The badged folders within one's home directory are one of those things. The way I see it, I already know they're folders, and slapping little badges on them, which are indecipherable in column view, is unnecessary. To me, the whole point of an icon is to make the item's name unnecessary. These are a bit easier to decipher in column view (for the most part), and (more importantly ;–), look very cool in icon view.

The Movies folder icon I'm particularly pleased with, though there is quite a bit of satisfaction in having finally decided on a Music icon. Do you have any idea how hard it is to come up with an icon that represents music? (What does music look like?) It's a rather abstract subject, and other than the ubiquitous clef note symbol, or the standard note symbol used for iTunes, there isn't much that springs to mind. Oh well.   At any rate, I hope you enjoy them.

Note:  Set tweaked 3 October, 2004.  The Sites and LIbrary folder have been updated.

HAL 9000

Thursday 18 October, 2001 13.04

One of the first icons to be released at the Graphics Factory for OS X, this one of everybody's favorite homicidal computer has turned out to be one of the most popular as well.