Imposing such limitations gives your designs clear boundaries, which is a good way of stopping you from going too crazy with all that inspiration. We might be able to use a million different colours in design today, but to make something look good, you should try and restrict yourself in the way these early designers once were.
#COOL ICONS FOR MAC WINDOWS#
We can see this in the icons on Windows 95. They stuck to strict colour schemes to ensure their designs looked great and worked with the operating systems. Early computers were restricted to maybe a few basic colours, but icon designers at the time worked very well within these limits. Use of colourĮarly icon design also provides a good lesson for use of colour. She developed a basic iconography and visual language – just look at her use of the ‘trashcan’ icon, which we now know as the recycling bin (the culture around how we treat our waste has changed a bit since the 1980s), or the floppy disk icon to represent – you guessed it – the floppy disk! This design work laid the foundations for what’s to come, still influencing many of the ideas we have about icon design such as using real-word iconography and visual simplicity.
#COOL ICONS FOR MAC MAC#
We can see this in her work on the original Mac icons. Susan Kare’s Mac Icons – Image courtesy of This philosophy has clearly paid off, and had a massive impact on the future of icon design. I try to optimise for clarity and simplicity even as palette and resolution options have increased. Sticking to a basic philosophy throughout her career, she says in her Design Biography: “I believe that good icons are more akin to road signs rather than illustrations, and ideally should present an idea in a clear, concise, and memorable way. She designed the icons for Macintosh 1.0, one of the first GUI-based consumer PCs to be sold en masse. Susan Kare is perhaps one of the most famous icon designers, and is still designing today. There’s certainly a few things we can still learn from the work of the early icon designers. The game may have changed, but the rules have stayed more or less the same.
However, the more you look into the early history of computer icons, the more you might realise that things aren’t that different today. Icon design has come a long way from its humble beginnings.