Apple has announced the release of Leopard, the newest incarnation of Mac OS X. Amongst 300+ new features, it also boasts several graphic enhancements like resolution independence, 512 pixel icons, a reflective dock and new a unified ‘theme’ for application windows. Now, only days before the release, I want to show you some of the major improvements and additions to the Mac software aesthetic.

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I have an employer with whom I’ve got a very long working record now. That is, he’s one of my longest-running clients, with whom I also have a very good working and talking relationship. We’re always developing new concepts, whether it be in icons, interfaces or other fields of life unrelated to software (hi, D!). Lately, while we were exploring things, we were looking over websites like istockphoto – websites where people can upload and buy stock graphics. Most people I try to reach with Icon Designer and my blog aren’t the people who get their graphics at those places. When I am appealing to people who want to hire me to make custom graphics, it’s like they are pursued go to a very exclusive restaurant that caters to them. They could go to the Fast Food King around the corner and eat what everybody with a disregard for personal health eats, and that’s basically the choice at hand. Considering most people I want to reach want to sell their product, let’s say in this metaphor they are people who need to sell their body. It’s easy, fast and cheap to eat junk food. It’s also bad for them in business.

Now, I don’t want to generalize to say that all stock art is bad. Sure, some stock art can look very good. The problem with stock art is that it’s akin, but worse than, going to a company like “Logo Farm 2000”. This company doesn’t exist (hopefully) but they make a logotype for $200, in 2 days, with 99 designs to choose from. This company also doesn’t really need a brief for the design; a company name will do. With stock art, you buy something and integrate it into your visual identity; the imprint you leave on people, visually, and the emotions and messages you convey are a part of that. With stock art, you go off on your own blind faith in your judgement to chose whatever you like and put it into a context where you feel it fits. There are a few problems with this.

Design, especially in logo’s and icons, isn’t about ‘art’. Creativity helps make new, innovative, and inspiring metaphors and ideas to lay a foundation for a well-executed and polished design. Design itself is all about solving problems and finding a great solution for it. There is purpose in all things, in a sense that it is very akin to the development of applications. These two fields meet in the type design business, where people develop a lot of little solutions to make one, unified working whole for which they sell licenses, exactly like software. Although in the software and typeface business, there’s also a market to make custom software for a particular case, which is almost the same as the work I do.

Coming back to my point, if I design something for you, it wouldn’t be cheap. I have had enough email transactions in which people have had second thoughts about the price of my services. I don’t really make concessions (in rare cases) – I’d much rather point you to this post. It surely won’t be as cheap as a logo farm or stock art. The design I make for you will benefit from the working knowledge I have as a full-time designer; I’ve been living and breathing visual design since I was born, and have been sustaining myself with it for years. When I design something, I don’t feel like I’m sitting behind my desk ‘doing my job’; I feel like I’m doing what I was put on this Earth to do. I will strive to create something that you will completely agree to in every aspect; it will communicate to people, at a glance, what you want it to communicate. It’s a unique graphic, tailored to you. It’s also the visual identity of your product, or your company; something that’s hard to put a price on. You can look around you for examples of visual identities; they are ubiquitous today. I’d happily ask some other clients about what they think of the final product I delivered to them; I strive for something that will change your perception of this indefinitely. You’ll start craving the cuisine and never even bother to consider junk food.

Development, for applications, is considered blindly outputting code where the problem is -a- problem, and the only solution is the right one. Non-developers rarely see programming as a creative process, while it’s a very creative one, that touches art on as many (if not more) fields as design. Design, nowadays, is integrated into all the aspects of our life. Everything you meet has been involved with a process of designing visuals for a purpose. Think about type design again; making typefaces changes the actual appearance of our language. You can truly invent in every choice you make. It is exactly the same for software. They’re also goods which require purchase and installation to be useful; that’s much less akin to designing. If you develop software, every choice you take is important and has everything to do with design. Still think of it in black and white? Consider scripting ligatures in OpenType fonts. This means you have to script in certain conditions to make automatic letter contractions work. Great fonts have this. Is this design? Most definitely.

I have presented two matters in which I think people don’t see black and white and people fail to see the weight of custom design. I want to show you, and many others, that design is such an important matter, that we should be grateful for every developer, designer and artist out there. In reality, we are all working together for a grand goal; making everything better.

Acorn, the new image editing program from Flying Meat is out. I found that out just now, as I was rubbing my eyes having just gotten out of bed. This gives me the chance to give a very educated blog post before anyone, uh, more witty can.

In his very funny blog post about ‘redacted.app’, Gus Mueller gave a clever preview of Acorn without spoiling the surprise. Acorn is, as he said in his interview, exactly the opposite from Photoshop. Photoshop’s “stuff”, and Acorn is “anti-stuff”. I’ll spoil a bit here as to why I have such insight in an application that was just released; I was in the Acorn beta while Gus wanted me to do some small icon work. What really astonished me was (apart from the rapid phase of development, a sure sign of coffee love) the way Gus solved a problem in the general image editor’s UI;

Acorn, as you can see, features the conventions we all know in image editors; we have tools, we take them from a palette to draw on a canvas. The result, for most image editors, is a screen akin to an airport where everything is up in the air and floats about your canvas, often obscuring parts or confusing you what palette to go to next. Acorn takes a very clever approach to this (does Gus know any other ways of approaching a hideous problem?); it puts the layer, tool, and color palettes into one. As you can see, this even features the tool’s options neatly in the right place. I’d kill for a version of my favorite image-editing gorilla with such a smart approach to reducing workspace clutter.

But smart placement of the things you need isn’t where Acorn’s features end. Gus has done well in keeping Acorn a simple and intuitive image editor you can just jump into. GPU (or hardware) acceleration, something that Pixelmator, the next hot thing in image editing land, boasts with, is something Acorn modestly lists in its feature listing. It has an intuitive feature for creating gradients, it smooths your pencil strokes, features a very nice fullscreen mode and much more.

Testing Acorn has been a very joyful experience for me, as Gus is very receptive to input and Acorn itself is nothing less than a joy to use. I’m happily buying a license for my girlfriend when I’m getting my next payment. It’s a mere 39,95 – as introductory price. You can test it out yourself or buy it now from his website.

In all the recent blogging about the Leopard dock, mostly negative, I decided to see if i could come up with some icons that go well with the new dock’s look. For the uninformed, the Leopard dock has a reflective ‘table’ underneath, which stirred a lot of commotion into the Mac community as being way over the top, too inspired by project ‘Looking Glass’ by Sun, and being very ugly when pinned to the left or right side of the screen.

Personally, I’ve been a bit quiet about the interface and icon developments in Leopard for the simple reason that I now have Leopard complete with the NDA that comes with it and I can’t disclose much, let alone make elaborate reviews on its (not even finished) interface elements. But honestly, I dig the Dock. In response to all the negative input, I much rather dislike the Tiger default dock, with the odd semi-opaque white rectangle behind it and the unclear separators. The Tiger dock has a very big issue with seeming ‘cluttered’ when either non-Apple icons or more than 9 icons are in it. Apple seems to have noticed, and put icons on a plane, extending the natural ‘tabletop’ perspetive. The Rogue Amoeba blog pointed out that this table perspective placed on the side of the screen doesn’t work, but I’d like to respond to that that in general, as icons are developed for the particular ‘tabletop’ perspective, that any dock doesn’t really work well when placed sideways. According to the guidelines, icons are just not meant to be placed on top of each other, but next to each other. We also read from left to right, not from the top to the bottom, so placing the Dock at the bottom is a natural thing to do, and I rarely see people doing otherwise.

Of course, redundant shadows bug me too. Of course, I think reflecting window contents and the desktop background goes a bit far. But has it bugged me since using Leopard? No, it hasn’t. With the new default wallpaper, you never notice the extra shadows (which is why I suspect Apple plans to take them out, and if they aren’t, there’ll be tools to do so faster than you can say ‘ihateit’) and the whole looks very unified and beautiful. Here’s a shot of my dock on Leopard;

As you can notice, a few icons stand out as seeming to be made for this new Dock. I’d say the Time Machine icon looks really good on it. But I want to point out that the four-legged assault droid that I use as my dock separator actually uses it as a design element. It’s been made specifically for the Leopard dock, and it strengthens the look of the icon. I created this very small new icon set to explore the possibilities. You can download the set now, on Icon Designer.

Notice how these two icons wouldn’t have been as strong in the Tiger dock, but really gain in power and meaning in the new dock. The conclusion? Adapting to the changes in the interface of Leopard can only be done by icon designers who find creative solutions. You can always make things look good, as long as you are creative.

When John Gruber pointed out that there was a preview of Nokia’s new *cough*original*cough* design for a phone, I looked at the photo’s, I watched the small, low-res video, and I fell on the floor and died. At least, part of me died.

This little shot above is not the icon design of the latest and greatest just-over-a-hundred-dollar (or euro) MP3 player with color screen. It is also not the PSP’s icon design. It’s actually Nokia’s idea of ‘cutting edge design’ which is supposed to compete with, uh, this. Let’s make a bit of fun and guess what the icons are for, from left to right. Starting left… uhh? I think I can make out vaguely that it is a rectangle with text smeared on it. One would logically assume this is the most important ‘thing’ you can click, as it’s way on the left, where your eyes start scanning the row of icons. Can’t make that out. Next to it; music. Way to go not copying Apple’s general grouping of ‘entertainment’, as Nokia has done in previous phones like the N95. A lot of icons follow that are either crystal clear (uh, a TV screen), completely unclear (a file? A person?) and completely ripped off (a compass??).

I am having the feeling that Nokia, who hasn’t been a great choice for people who like nice icons on their phone until now, doesn’t really hire the right people for the job here. I mean, general opinion is one thing here, and you may or may not like such mashups of the PSP and iPhone icon design, but there’s something you can see easily here; The iPhone’s icons are not only a lot more discerning (in general and from each other), they actually have more factors to discern by. They have color, for one, and they are also logically separated.

I live in Europe, and as such, the Nokia phone is the phone you see most often. I always amaze myself at the incredibly complex hierarchy of menu’s and the placement of functions. Me, and I think about every ex-Nokia user over the ocean is eagerly tapping fingers until the iPhone arrives, waiting for the horror of searching through 10 menu’s to find that one application or bluetooth setup utility.

This may seem like a huge rant about Nokia gone bad, but I’d rather want to show you what makes Apple special. It’s knowing what people you hire and even then, checking them and running them by a design philosophy that’s proven and about as simple as it can get. I want to thank Nokia, even, for a great example of where we don’t want to go when it comes to icon design.

ps. Yes, I know September 5th is close. The work is killing me but it’s proving to be quite an awesome release soon. Stay tuned!

I’ll be out starting tomorrow and you can get Noble with 70% discount starting now. Grab it at the Icon Store if you need some icons. Do note that I won’t be able to email out the icon sets and licenses until I am back, but I’ll send them as soon as I get home.

Now for something to keep you sweet all the days that I am away; a little new preview of the folderset. Unorthodox nature motives! Check out the preliminary unpolished Aqua, Anodized and Wood variants;

Input very welcome! Now, I’ll see you all again August 20th – I’ll be sure to enjoy myself with the music, atmosphere and people.