![]() In fact, this may be one of my favorite icons now.īack at the Interarchy web site, we see a new icon, this one definitely looking better than the fuzzy silver one, but I’m still not sure I like it as much as the brown one. Besides the shadow at the bottom, I think it looks pretty damn good. Here’s the brown Interarchy icon, at full size. The silver one just looks to soft and fuzzy to me. Well, the brown one seemed to have a size of 512px wide/high, while the silver one was only 128px wide/high. I thought I should blow them up and see how they look. I was still disturbed by the new icon… so much so, that I am actually using the old one on my copy of Interarchy. Still, progress marches on, and the icon changed. I’ve got a lot more shiny looking white or silver icons than I do brown ones. I know brown probably isn’t hip in the shiny Apple/OS X world, but honestly the brown one stands out much more for me. It just doesn’t look as clear and sharp as the brown one. It’s still a filing cabinet, but I think it loses something. After installing Interarchy 9 I got the silvery icon on the right. At first I thought it was because of the similarities to the old Anarchie icon, but then more I think about it, I think it’s just a well designed icon. On the left is the old brown Interarchy icon. Ahhh, icons were much simpler back then…. I’ve blow it up here for you to see the pixels. ![]() The small one on the left was all you’d ever see in the Finder, as classic Mac OS didn’t scale up the size of icons at all. Interarchy was originally called “Anarchie” and this was the icon under classic Mac OS. You can see the full set a bit larger on the Nolobe Blog here.īy the way, Nolobe (makers of Interarchy) are having an awesome Fire Sale right now, which is worth checking out.People seemed to enjoy my post Twitter Apps Reviewed where I rated applications based on their icons, and this go-around we’re looking at Interarchy, a Mac file transfer application I’ve been using for many years. Matthew was awesome to work with, and we were both very happy with how the icons turned out. In the end we settled with the current, beautiful yet unassuming icon for the application, and with a few revisions and emails back and forth we arrived at an equally satisfying set of supporting icons for the application itself. And how about a cabinet resembling a Mac Pro? ![]() I did mockups of a thin-edge ‘full black’ cabinet and a pure aluminium one. I won’t bore you too much with the process of all the icons, but some of the concepts of the application icon are interesting to see. Interarchy is a powerful and feature-rich application, and making the icons beautiful, but also appealing to the target user base is a great bonus. This makes the icons appear very modern and advanced, very much in line with what we wanted to represent with the Interarchy icons. It’s also the set of colors and materials we consider typical of Apple’s latest generation of hardware. I think this could be a great theme: not too outspoken like icons that are bright blue and black, but a subtle kind of consistency that gives the icons an extra quality when used together. While I am not a huge fan of outspoken themes in icons for an application, the stylistic direction Matthew envisioned of aluminium / silver, black, and perhaps subtle desaturated colors summoned beautiful visions of icons in my head. Changing the icon now would mean neglecting its long history and evolution. Matthew also expressed his desire to maintain the filing cabinet metaphor in the application icon, and I agreed. Like several other FTP clients, Interarchy has always been known and discerned by its icon. ![]() This was no small release, so it had to be worth it. Matthew contacted me with a request for new icons for the big upcoming version 10. Interarchy is a Mac app that’s almost as old as I am: it was first created in 1993 as one of the first FTP clients for the Mac, and in 2007 it was sold to its current owner and long-time developer of Interarchy, Matthew Drayton of Nolobe. ![]()
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