Since we’re steadily moving towards fully appropriating and settling into our new studio (home/office), I’ve posted a few pictures of our new location.

If you’re Dutch, you may recognize the artistic direction of the building as ‘de Stijl’;

(… De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. [It] advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour — [members of de Stijl] simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white. – wikipedia )

The similarity is not coincidental, as the entire block was designed by the founder of de Stijl, Theo van Doesburg. As such, we considered it to be the perfect location for such a graphic studio!

Feel free to check out more of the images on our flickr.

I have been noticing a disturbing trend in custom interface design of third party applications for Mac OS X. As it is no longer an exception for software developers to build interface elements that are entirely unique to their application, the threshold for customizing other, system-standard interface elements is also lowered significantly. The ghastly trend I am about to describe is in existence due to this lowered threshold. In fact, I think this particular deviation off the beaten interface path would have been far more frowned upon a few years ago, when Mac interface designers were more conservative in using custom UI elements in general, and Apple disapproved of it more fiercely. Today, however, it won’t even stand in the way of scoring a design award runner-up, as my examples will go to prove.

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First off, let me thank everyone for such a great reception of Icon Resource. The first 24 hours of its existence were fantastically exciting, and I’ve gotten an overwhelming amount of positive feedback. I will consider all your input carefully. Now, I wanted to tell a story that relates a lot to, amongst things, Icon Resource and its genesis, but most importantly, radically changed the way I look at life and the things I feel strongly about.

It has been waiting to be written since late January of this year. It was around that time, late into the evening, in my brand new little office, that my laptop made the familiar ‘bling!’ sound of new mail. I got off from my chair, opened Mail, and found an email from a representative of Apple. They were wondering if I would be interested in a position at Apple in Cupertino.

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The day has come, and Icon Resource, the biggest project I’ve spearheaded since the start of my own company has gone live. You can now go to the Icon Resource website to watch a sample video, read more about the contents, or acquire your access to the polished Icon Resource member area.

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