Quote:
1) Did you had any idea in what direction the response to the new icon would go?
The debate that has risen up around iconography and the merits of what we've done taken in a broader context is impressive. The new direction is a bigger change than I think anyone in the public would have expected from us, change on that scale is going to be hard and of course there are those who will rise up and scream heresy. Honestly, we have been living with the icon system internally on our own machines for so long now that it's a bit hard to remember what the big deal is. We're as varied and hardcore a user group as will be found anywhere, we've found the stuff just works. Done.
2) The horizontal folders is that a hint of what is coming in Leopard :D, or what was the thinking behind that?
Hints of Leopard? Not exactly. The "flat" folder is reflexive of the overall approach we've taken in the iconography throughout the desktop (document icons, module icons, etc), which is driven by the work in our application UI's (check out Acrobat 8 in particular). Simple and clear, though you can definitely see that approach in Apple's UI work as well. It's a focus on function, but executed with an exquisite elegance
What we had in the CS2 days were elaborate 3d-rendered icons for documents and things which looked nice at really huge views but reduced to little puddles of pixel mud at the small sizes. Arguably it's the 16px and maybe 32px icon view that are the most prevalent, so it's those sizes that we focused on in creating our technique for rendering the figures. The new bits look simple, and in contrast to the 3d-style work out there they are, but there's a lot of nuance to give them richness that scales to the larger sizes.
3) Not sure if you can reveal this yet but I wonder if the minimal look will also be reflected in the package design?
Yeah, I can't give anything away here. The desktop icons are tiny extractions – you could call them "pixels" if you like – from the much larger packaging art.
