Susan Kare designed many of the original Apple icons, using a felt marker and graph paper no less. Kare is also noteable for designing "the first proportionally spaced digital font family that allowed text to breathe as naturally on the Mac’s white screen as it does in the pages of a book."
This updated article at PLOS is worth the time for anyone with even a passing interest in GUI design, or in the early days' decisions that form the basis for pretty much every icon used today.
This month Kare's sketchbook from that era is being displayed as part of the "This is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good" exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Kare also has self-published book available "Icons" — find it here.
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Sketchbook of Susan Kare, Apple Icon designer, at NY Museum of Modern Art
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @07:22AM
Well obviously, Colonel Obvious. It's black-and-white pixel art for a 9-inch screen at 512×342. The pixels look huge! Graph paper squares are the logical choice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @07:35AM
But where's the facebook icon? How I get on internet with appletalk? Macintrash is lame.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bd on Monday February 23 2015, @11:06AM
While I do like the work of Susan, somehow I am skeptical about these claims that she designed "the first proportionally spaced digital font family". Xerox PARC had proportional fonts way before.
See, for example, the proportional text in this (bad quality) Xerox STAR screen-shot. [kruzeniski.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Monday February 23 2015, @12:07PM
It's 2015 dude, as with so many other things, it didn't exist until Apple invented it.
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Monday February 23 2015, @05:12PM
Yeah, but Bravo's spacing sucks at that point and Simonyi invented Hungarian Notation, too. So, as it sucked, and Apple is teh awesomeness, it wasn't really invented yet.
That is all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @05:16AM
I like how the xerox had the text *inside* the icons instead of under them! why did they stop doing that?
(for the big icons I never use in a filemanager but that seems to be default everywhere, and can't be turned off at the desktop I mean)
In the normal menu and filemanager icons to the left of the filename the 16x16px icon would be too small ofcourse :-D
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Monday February 23 2015, @11:09AM
(Score: 3, Funny) by jimshatt on Monday February 23 2015, @11:20AM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by lentilla on Monday February 23 2015, @11:26AM
I saw that too but it was the caption sandwiched between the two images that had me shaking my head.
First image: a DOS prompt (ignoring it's implausible nature - I think we're all used to seeing "fanciful" depictions of "computer stuff" by now, right?)
Second image: a mass of icons, arranged in a grid, on a pretty backdrop.
Caption: "How did we get from there to here?"
And I thought: yeah, how did we get from a clear and concise instruction to having to manually search through tens of icons in order to achieve something simple? May as well try knitting with baseball mitts on.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday February 23 2015, @03:27PM
Because normal people are too dumb to get how a command prompt works.
(Score: 3, Informative) by everdred on Monday February 23 2015, @06:19PM
> the "C:>"
> RUN isn't even a DOS command
While the idea of running autoexec.bat on such a system would be silly, that prompt and the RUN command were indeed part of ProDOS [wikipedia.org], which ran on Apple II systems.
(Score: 2) by everdred on Monday February 23 2015, @07:52PM
(To reply to myself, it wasn't only ProDOS; Apple DOS [wikipedia.org] worked this way too.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @04:54AM
I'm kind of missing my old apple][+ (compatible), how can I integrate the apple2 softwares better into my current linux desktop?
(Score: 2) by everdred on Tuesday February 24 2015, @05:28PM
Your comment made me realize that it's been quite a few years since I've used an emulated Apple II, probably predating my move to Linux. Based on the very quick look around I just did, the most promising solution seems to be MESS [toddlyons.ca].