Work on the Desktop Environment at Silicon Graphics 1989-1995

The works shown are the logo, icons, and a window that illustrates the look and feel that we designed for the Indigo Magic Desktop, which was created and managed by Betsy Zeller. Rob Myers came up with most of the UI concepts, and I created the graphics. This work began in 1989 with the creation of the original icon set, and continued into 1995 with all aspects of the look and feel of the desktop.

This was the spinning logo designed for the first Netscape browser that ran on the SGI platform.

The icons, being made of lines and polygons and controlled by a compact "icon language", are scaleable, and able to easily represent a number of states. This makes them different from bitmap icons, which do not scale. The icons are 2D objects, but were created to give a "21/2D" look. The diamond-shaped "magic carpet", drawn underneath the unique part of the application icons, moves to a vertical position to indicate that the application is running. This is illustrated in the Showcase icons below. Only a small sample of icons are shown. I don't even know how many of them I did in total. Probably hundreds.

Icons for Jot, Video In, and the imgedit pixel editing tool.

Color Raster Printer icons, showing the "Idle", "In Use", and "Busted" states. More icons were done for different printer types, but all follow this same format.

These Showcase icons show the different states that are built into the icon language. The top row shows the "Default", "Located", "Located/Selected" and "Located/Deselected" states. The bottom row shows the running application using the same states. The icon on the far right shows a Showcase data file being dragged onto the Showcase icon in order to start the application. The blue color indicates that the application accepts this file when it is dragged and dropped.