sunday, february 25, 2007
A taxonomic litany of trivial obsession
I have an innocent-looking folder that holds 77.5 megabytes of tiny OS X icons, carefully sorted into 20 top-level folders and a zillion sub-folders. In each folder, the icons are visually organized by subject, and I’ve renamed most of the icons to make more sense. Here are screenshots of two folders, “clothes” and “furniture”:
Two of the other folders are organized as follows:
- food (16 icons, plus the ones in the following sub-folders)
- meals (26)
- breakfast (20)
- sushi (11)
- drinks (28)
- fast food (7)
- fruit (29)
- café (26)
- dessert (39)
- hot topic (72)
- alien faces (8)
- bloody (14)
- dust (8)
- gargoyles (16)
- gas masks (4)
- ghosts (9)
- medieval (9)
- mutant heads (5)
- sea monsters (13)
- wild things (7)
I don’t remember where I got most of my icons. They are stripped of copyright information and recontextualized into arrangements of associations, etc. Here are some of my favorite icon-makers, though:
- Marmalade Moon — flowers, bird eggs
- I Heart New York — Magnetic Fields songs, mutant faces, domo-kuns
- Pixel Press Icons — pirates, moleskines, canoe paddles, feng shui, instruments
- Afterglow — New Zealand stuff, brains on carts
InterfaceLIFT is the best place to find many more, if you would like to fall into this hole of low-level insanity with me.
