Clear Design: Icons, part one.
by Ben Thompson
Creative Director/VP, The Lux Group

The birth of the graphical user interface (GUI) also spawned the graphic icon. The ground-breaking move away from text-based systems was one of the prime differentiators between the Macintosh operating system and those that had come before it. The next year, Microsoft Windows 1.0 released, followed quickly by Word for Windows 1.0, and there was no looking back to text-based computing.

Icons at that time were 32 pixels square, rendered in no more than the sixteen system colors (when available), and these little darlings made the difference between a drab, workaday interface, and a more inviting, more intuitive work environment. My first icon project was in 1992, while working for Microsoft. The first version of the Microsoft Windows Sound System was being released with a bundled package of sounds, each of which needed a distinctive icon. I had fun putting together the tiny images in flat or isometric perspective showing bells, chimes, saws, and other noisy things. I am compelled to confess that with sixteen years and hundreds of design projects in between me and those icons, my memory has faded, and I’m not clear on what all of them were intended to represent—the jackhammer is clear enough, but the smartly rendered foot coming down on a banana peel is mysterious to me. I’m hoping it was a slide whistle.

Over the years, operating systems, hardware, and information graphics became more sophisticated. Better designers than I am devoted hours to telling stories or giving direction in those 32x32 pixel squares. With each version of the Mac or Windows operating system (with contributions here and there from outliers like NeXTor OS2) the art of the icon got more sophisticated. Then in November 1993, a funny thing happened.

For designers like myself who were internet-savvy (and up until then, that meant working with text-based USENET applications like Telnet, or FTP protocols for transferring files) and who’d worked on multimedia projects for proprietary systems up until then, the ability of a designer to present graphics on the Web opened a world of possibility for online design. Although the neutral gray background was a drawback at first, and the necessity for having text left justified (the ‘center’ tag was a year or two out at that time) was a limitation, a designer could put artwork up, have control over headline fonts, and offer interactivity with a relatively simple bit of coding.
Of course there were other limitations: in 1994, everybody looked at the web through phone line modems of varying slowness. Worse for designers, there were still a lot of really lousy monitors around. Around that time, I remember going in to talk to someone about some freelance work and seeing my online portfolio up on a sixteen-color monitor. All of the lovely continuous-tone scans that I’d included had dithered into the sixteen system colors. Horrifying.

Fortunately, that state of affairs didn’t last long. Paragraph justification options, background colors and photos, frames, tables, streaming media, and cascading style sheets were soon to come, and the graphic web environment has just gotten richer and richer. There’s still one thing that connects contemporary Web design projects to the earliest days of computer interface graphics: the icon.

Part Two to follow…

Lux Pitches in to Prevent Doomsday

Jayson Jarmon
President, The Lux Group, Inc.

As one of the most innovative Internet Development companies in the region, Lux prides itself on finding common sense solutions for its clients. In light of recent developments regarding the creation of microscopic blackholes by the Large Hadron Collider, Lux has taken steps to prevent its employees and contractors from taking similarly threatening actions.

As of today, Lux employees are prohibited from breaking the laws of thermodynamics in the office. Please see notice below, posted in the Lux facility. We hope other businesses follow our example and help keep the solar system safe!

BANG! Just kidding.

We at Lux congratulate the scientists from the CERN Particle Physics center in Europe for successfully erecting the Large Hadron Collider. At a cost of ten billion dollars, the LHC represents the most expensive and most ambitious attempt that mankind has made to peer into the origins and mechanisms of the universe. Over the next few years, look forward to a series of barely-comprehensible, yet fascinating stories to be dumbed-down and reported to us as a human interest story by astonished-sounding local news anchors.
People being people, though, not everyone is happy about this new peek at the fabric of reality. A contingent of The Concerned has become more and more vocal, insisting that this will lead to the end of the world. The naysayers are an interesting mix of folks—the usual handful of contrarian scientists who gather a bit of the spotlight by providing ‘opposing viewpoints,’ has been amplified by the Easily Scared…the same folks who have basements full of eight year old MREs left over from when the world ended on January 1, 2000.
Mix those folks in with the anti-science contingent (I’m talking to YOU, Kansas, and to YOU, Florida) and you get a vocal bunch of torch-bearing villagers who are up in arms about the “European Time Machine” and its attempts to unravel the mysteries of the Big Bang.
Will The Concerned and the Easily Scared stop the Large Hadron Collider? It’s doubtful. Are they right that it could spell the end of the universe (as we know it)? Also doubtful. Just in case, though, It’s probably a good idea to check in from time to time with a fantastically useful site, “Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet?”

Ben Thompson 9.10.08