Rockstar Icon Designer - Kate McInnes [5]
Mac OS X and the new Aqua theme was unlike any icons that came before them. Detailed, glossy and "lickable" became the new benchmark for the Macintosh style.
2001 Windows XP
The same year that Apple launched the revolutionary Mac OS X, Microsoft released Windows XP. Also bundled with a new interface and icons (unofficially named Luna), XP has a saturated color palette with icons rendered in a soft illustrative style that uses a single light source and subtle drop shadows. Windows XP adds support for 32-bit color (16.7 million colors plus alpha channel transparency) to the Microsoft icon library and allows for semitransparent areas like shadows, anti-aliasing or glass-like effects.
Produced in collaboration with design company, Icon Factory, the XP style took four months to develop with an additional 4 months spent supervising the production of over 100 icons by Microsoft's creative department[8].
Windows XP style icons created in conjunction with Icon Factory.
2005 Tango Desktop Project
An initiative of freedesktop.org, the Tango Desktop Project is focused on creating conventions and style guides for a consistent user experience across all open-source desktop environments. Founded by Jakub Steiner (then designer at Novell) and Steven Garrity (Part of the Mozilla Visual Identity Team), Tango was officially announced in October 2005 at the GNOME developers Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. Tango is maintained by a core group of user interface designers and has an open collaborative format that encourages volunteers to help with work on the project. Tango provides and maintains guidelines that detail the colors, perspective and visual balance of the Tango icons, a list of common metaphors and a standard icon naming specification. Tango icons are designed for multi-platform use and have a style that's intentionally understated so that the icons don't look out of place on Windows, Mac and Linux desktops. Steering away from the hyper-realistic style of Mac OS X and Windows 7, the Tango icon set is clearly rendered, easy to view at smaller scales and conveys precise meanings. A recent addition to the Tango design guidelines is the X-Large style icon. Based loosely on the 256px Windows Vista style icon (without the special gloss finishes), Tango warn against creating this variation as achieving a usable icon at this scale requires restraint and a good eye for design. Popular programs that use Tango style icons are web browser Mozilla Firefox, image manipulation program GIMP, word processor Open Office and desktop publishing program Scribus. The Tango icons were released as public domain in 2009. Learn more about the Tango Icon specifications in the "Popular Platforms - Guidelines and Style Tips" section of this book.
Tango icons demonstrate a style that is clear and easy to use.
2008 KDE SC 4
KDE was brought to life with a simple Usenet post entitled "New Project: Kool Desktop Environment (KDE), Programmers Wanted!", the rest is Desktop history. Founded in 1996, KDE is an international free software community best known for the Plasma Workspace. With a simple philosophy to create the best free desktop software, KDE has grown to hundreds of developers with major releases scheduled every six months.
In 2008, KDE launched KDE Software Compilation 4 which adopted a new user interface, widgets and icons designed as part of the Oxygen Project. The goal of the Oxygen project was to break with the cartoonish look of the icons in KDE 3.0 and move towards a more mature and modern user experience. This change in creative direction paid off and made KDE a true competitor to other desktop environments such as Mac OS and Windows. KDE was rewarded for their hard work in March 1999 when they were awarded 'Software Innovation of the Year' at the world's largest IT tradeshow, CeBIT[9]. The true strength of the Oxygen Project is the guidelines and standards it has developed to assist developers in creating programs that effortlessly blend into the KDE Desktop.
Oxygen Icons are created using