Joining a community
I started my designer career by releasing free icon sets on a forum called MacThemes. It was a glorious time for the design community.
Photoshop was adopting vectors and layer effects, with powerful, non-destructive control over shadows, textures, and gradients. It was perfect to make photo-realistic icons, the new hype in the 128×128 icon era.
The growing internet allowed designers to gather on multiple forums, share work, source files, and criticize each other’s work. This is where I first met a lot of the people in the design community.
This is an archive of all the icon sets I released during the 2006–2009 period, in chronological order. It gets better, I promise 😅
Albook
My first real “System replacement” icon set. If I recall correctly, it was designed in Illustrator because Photoshop vector support was still quite basic (or so I tell myself). It is pretty bad, but hey, it had 350 icons!
Neige
My first set made entirely using Photoshop. It was obviously inspired by the transparent G4 Cube. Learning to draw transparent materials is a mandatory step in the life of an icon designer 😅
Crême
Crême is an evolution from Neige. I wanted to reduce the gloss significantly and try to emulate something softer, a plastic sheen that was popular at the time.
The folders and files icons were still mostly official Apple icons slapped on, but I had started to grasp gradients and shadows at this point.
Blend
Black and white was a design constraint I gave myself, and it forced me to focus on the soft shadows, contrast, and find semantic uses for black and white materials in drives and folders.
This is also the first icon set that I designed at 512×512 instead of 128×128. The amount of detail you could cram in there was no joke. I remember jamming so hard, at 1200% zoom in Photoshop, for hours.
Aquablend
As nice as Blend was, after a while, you kind of miss color. Aquablend was a blend of Blend and Aqua. Or something…
Probably my favorite icon set. It was the most usable and the most “mature” as a set. It has a consistency that I still appreciate.
Aquave
Aquave was what you could call my first “open-source project”. I delivered the first set of icons, along with providing the source files. On my website, a gallery would grow as people riffed off the source and created brand-new icons. In the end, 130 icons were contributed by 27 different people.
Ciment
My last real icon set. I wanted something subdued for daily usage. We had clearly entered the “all noise, no gloss” age of icon design. This was released a couple of months before I started my work at Apple.
The Photoshop source is also included.
