Thanks, I think, to the Ticking-Tocks, my now, holy shit, 13 yo kid somehow has become enamored with late 20th-century/early 2000s industrial design, specifically a movement he’s calling Frutiger Aero, but us old people just remember as the translucent and colorful candy-colors era. It was a fun era of design, I think, and I happened to have my wife’s old 1999 iBook, all bright orange and translucent, and Otto really wanted to try it out. I got it fired up again, and was hit with a wet slap of nostalgia, including some car-related nostalgia, which means I can use it for a Cold Start! Behold, an icon pack I made in the 1990s, featuring the cars driven by the members of my old sketch comedy group, The Van Gogh-Goghs.
These icons were made for Mac OS 9, which at the time had a maximum icon size of 32×32 pixels– modern icons can be up to 512×512, so these are pretty tiny. At the time, in like 1999 or so, icon sets were kind of A Thing, and there were sites that had nothing but sets of icons! Looks like some are still around, even, in some form!
More important, though, are the cars. Since I was the one making the icons, I thought it was important to include our cars, because I’ve always been a gearhead, as you know.
The set of cars is interesting as a sample of what people – at least six dorks who moved to LA to perform sketch comedy in shitty clubs – were driving. We had my ’73 Beetle, of course, a red XJ Cherokee that always seemed to have some cooling system issue, a mid-’90s Honda Accord, a Ford Escort GT that at the time seemed crappy but I have more respect for now, after prepping a non-GT Escort for a Lemons Race, and a pair of Saturn S-series cars, one first gen, one second-gen.
Want close-ups of the icons, so you can see every little pixel? Every little sub-pixel? Sure you do!
The Dr.Soda icon was there because we once, like in 1995 or something, did a comprehensive taste-test of as many Dr.Whatever sodas (ironically, there actually is a Dr.Whatever) and let me tell you, it was hell. The favorite color/steak is from an inside joke I barely remember, but I think still works.
Otto was pretty pleased by the experience, though. We couldn’t get it to go online, sadly, but it should be possible?
Also, if you want to waste more time on archaic VGG stuff, the website is sort of mothballed (it was picked by US News and World Report as one of the three best comedy sites on the web in 1999!) but you can poke through the rubble here.
Alternately, I can just show you Taillight Ruiners yet again:
I’m so old.
I spent too many hours making my own custom icons for my Windows machines back in the 90’s. There was a surprising amount of customization you could do with OS’s back then. I was so proud of those tiny bits of art.
the rise of gen alpha getting into frutiger aero is hilarious to me. Since frutiger aero made my so angry. Why is everything skeuomorphic! Why is there a fish floating through grass on my computer! Why is everything a jolly rancher color and opacity! Argh…
Man, I love Frutiger Bold. Its the font of the back of almost every Metallica album!
Jason your icon had hair! Sorry I couldn’t resist. Most windows machines of the vintage had rj45 jacks on them, you could at least plug em into your router. Being an Apple consumer rig I’m doubtful, but I’m sure there are apple geeks out there to help. I suspect that you may have to find a vintage USB wifi dongle that OS 9 supports. Again not an Apple geek so just a guess.
Hair, yes. Combed? Doesn’t look like it.
You gotta add these as emojis on the Discord, man.
When I got my first Garmin GPS in the late 90’s my buddies and I had a lot of fun making icons of the cars we drove so we didn’t have to use a pointer or the generic blob of a car they gave you for the icon. In my case it was a MINI, we even got the colors imported, as well as details like the big sunroof (represented by just a black, rounded corner rectangle on the roof of the car) those were fun times – now I just use whatever comes with the Garmin. We also had fun changing what they said for directions, and some of the guys got very creative – example “recalculating” became “Dammit Jim, you’re going the wrong way” spoken in the best Dr. McCoy voice……fun times!
I’m amused that the early-90s Saturn is considered “old,” while the 80s-era Escort isn’t.
Thanks for sharing!
As there are two Saturns, I think they’re just distinguishing between the original and the ’96 facelift.
I had no idea that look had a name…neat! Kinda like finding out that the design aesthetic I remember from my childhood is called Memphis Design.
This brought back a lot of memories; I’ll never forget when I figured out how to edit an icon on my Mac, but I never came up with anything nearly half as cool as this!
lol this is awesome, pixel art is still cool and these are great. Try animating them in GIFs so they sort of bounce a bit like theyr’e ready to take off. 🙂
Gotta critique that XJ. First off, there shouldn’t be any red body color to the sides of the grille, only on top. On the sides there are amber corner indicators. Second, front diff in the center? Come on.
I guess you didn’t know David yet so maybe ignorance is a good enough excuse.
Now that you mention it, the grill is missing it’s 7th slat!
Well xjs have mostly 8 slot grilles with a few 10 or 21 slot grilles.
When jeep is defending their seven slot grille trademark they often forget that about half of the vehicles they’ve ever sold did not have a seven slot grille.
I’ve gotten back into icon making in the past year or two due to Discord. See my P41 over to the left, only exists to satisfy my Discord wishes. I repurposed it here after the fact. I just had another small design queue I wanted to introduce that I conceived while staring at said icon/emoji/user thingy on Friday night, actually. It’s a fun waste of a few hours on a random night you are trying to avoid responsibility.
I’m very into online collaborative pixel art games and now I wanna recreate your VW icon.
I haven’t thought about changing my icons in a long time. I never got that into changing icon packs and making my own icons for programs, since I prioritized function, but I always did like the amount of creativity and art that could get packed into a few pixels. It’s a good exercise in communicative imagery to pack all that meaning and detail into a 32×32 block of pixels.
Also, really good job on those icons. They are great!
Nothing better than having an icon write about icons. Fun stuff, JT.
I remember being more confused than anything by Frutiger Aero (pretty sure we didn’t really have a name for it at the time, it was coined retroactively, like Art Deco), it was like, you’d start your computer or open a program, and there’d be a picture of a computer tower floating on a cloud in a blue sky with a green meadow under it and a free-standing door in the middle of the grass leading nowhere, and it’s like, I’m just here to check email and open a spreadsheet, what does all this have to do with any of that?
The free standing door to nowhere is actually magical and leads to the princess. I encountered it in King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne.
Nice! All of my best pixel art was done with 8×8 characters on a VIC-20. Yeah, I’m that old…
Icon sets were awesome, I remember the early 2000s I’d get the shiny glossy icon packs, and remap all my shortcuts using them and hide the descriptions so my desktop looked super sleek! Then having to hover over them trying to figure out what I set my winamp or firefox to as they weren’t intuitive enough, good times..
Bwahaha!
Stop making me feel old… 😛
IIRC that would have had only 802.11b wireless, which should have been deprecated by now on any modern access points, but it should also have an Ethernet jack. If so, you could connect it to a port on your router (if so equipped) with a CAT5 cable and go look at some pixelly internets.
That’s exactly what I tried! But still no dice.
Assuming the link light comes on when the cable is connected to both devices (meaning the Apple network interface hasn’t died in the past 20+ years), then I would check to ensure the laptop is set to use DHCP and the router port is offering DHCP. If one or both can’t/won’t do that, you can manually assign an IP address.
Be sure to use an internal network port on the router; some have a DMZ port which may allow inbound connections.
Pixel art is the best art.
I hugely enjoy seeing pixel art versions of things I either own or have photos off. Somehow taking detail away concentrates the bits that matter.
I can see a couple of days getting wasted in making/finding pixel versions of all my cars now.
I still want a translucent purple iPhone
SAME!
Thanks for this bit of nostalgia, Torch!
Tangerine iBook. Band name, called it.
I was a product designer at an injection moulding company back in 98/99 and one of the directors asked me if it would be possible to make our current products in that trendy translucent plastic instead, and how much it would cost in tooling.
He was delighted when I told him that not only was the tooling free because it’s the same, but we’d actually save money on coloured plastic, and that we’d been making translucent parts as scrap for decades when purging the machines between different colours.
I’m still not sure if this trend was intentional design or well-spun cost-cutting.
“we’d been making translucent parts as scrap for decades when purging the machines between different colours.”
Does it come out as homogenous or do you get swirls of color mixed in clear?
Swirls at the start of a purge, then mostly homogeneous and fading as the traces get pushed out. It depends on the tooling though.
So, was the base plastic clear to begin with?
Depends on the base material, but yeah, mostly. Getting crystal clear plastic with optically smooth surfaces on both sides of the tool is a pain, but for small complex parts transparent is a cost down.
Oh yes OS9 icon sets… I pulled some of em off a while back and use them on my MacBook still. We had one of those clamshell iBooks! It’s such terrifically fun design