|
|
Here are a dozen raster bitmap icons I did for X in 2006. Two (the blue bottle and valve) have alpha semi-transparencies which take on the hue of whatever background upon which they're displayed.
Here's some GUI archaeology, a sample sheet from the late 1990s. These are mostly from sets of application icons made for developers.
15 years on, let's have a look at these 32x32 standard 16 colour VGA icons I drew mostly in early 1993, targeted for Windows 3.1. On a standard 640x480 256 colour office or home display back in the day these would have looked about half again as big as they likely do here (which is too small). Given the lack of fetching icons floating about in 1993 they did look kinda cool at the time. Anyway this is my old Milano freeware icon set, downloaded in the tens of thousands from Compuserve when it was the biggest online service in the world (and not owned by AOL). The zipped archive had a Windows icon .dll and a text file with my Compuserve email address. I was startled at the number of design inquiries I got (hence Seal Beach icons). All of these were done with the very handy, slick (and long-gone) PC Tools icon editor. Many have only six or seven colours, along with a "transparent colour" now and then. Meanwhile these icons are pixel-level line art meant spot on for a 32x32 square so they only scale up faithfully in size multiples of 32.
On big modern displays meant for very fast, anti-aliased true colour photographic detail and smoothly rendered shading all on the fly anywhere across the desktop, the pixel-level symmetry of these tiny bitmaps is thrown off by hardware scaling and we get only hints of how they truly looked on (and jumped out from) the CRTs and native screen geometry for which they were drawn. Put the cursor over each icon to read what it was meant for/as.
The red cross has a cheat: While bringing these into .png files with the Gimp I added an alpha semi-transparency to its drop shadow, unthinkable in 1993.
contact |
home |
tips |
design |
privacy
© 1993-2008 Seal Beach icons
|
|
