I want to know more about icons I see daily
I have some history with "funky" desktop environments.
Back in 2004 while still a kid my uncle showed to me one of these programs that change the look of window frames, I think it was StyleXP? And then another one to change these familiar Windows XP icons into something that blew my mind.
I did not know about existence of mac back then, it was just not a thing, but what a joy it was, fast forward a few weeks, this kid spent hours searching and downloading all icon packs she could get hands onto — installing them, checking how things look now, maybe change window theme colors, scroll through wallpapers, rinse and repeat, a whole new reason to live, phaha.
Fast forward to year 2006, I think Vista became a thing around that time. I became a regular reader of local magazines dedicated to PCs, it was mostly about games which which I skipped for the most part, but there were these CDs, ahh, the shareware, the utilities, all the goodies along with goofy Winamp skins.
So one of these days I see a thing called "LiteStep". It was described as a modular desktop environment from which one can make about anything, cool, and there we screenshots. It was one of default-ish configurations with a big bar with virtual desktops, tray on the left and some task-bar buttons. Given I've never seen mac or linux at that time, it was mind blowing. Out of nostalgia I dug up some screenshots on WebArchive:
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I think at some point I stumbled at a specific theme that used icons which some people now call "pre-2.15 Gnome". Here is a screenshot from Solaris 9 (thanks to Nathan) showing it in a wild:
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There is something about this combination of deep washed-out purple, desaturated colors, sharp but not pixel-sharp lines and shadow that make icons pop out a little bit. So much in fact I ended up fighting very hard to follow that style to this day! I think I gave up running linux apps under Cygwin on WinXP back in 2013, and one of very things I looked for were "these" icons.
The year is 2026 and I happened to get some free time on my hands, the theme I've eventually found is called "OldGnome2", and it was also getting old and falling apart: no icons here or there, weird icon choices in new apps, wrong sizes, all these small things that make my workspace look like it is being held together with glue and tape (and that is true haha).
...Ahem. So I made a bit of research by skimming through commit history in the Adwaita Icon Theme repository and found that MOST of these icons were made by 2 people:
First, tigert: looking at repository commits he contributed them starting from at least 1997 and until 2005 just around release of new Tango icons.
Meet Tuomas "tigert" Kuosmanen and his Flicker profile of awesome
The guy has commited hungreds of these icons which I think took inspiration from NeXTStep/Solaris environments. Some of them you've probably seen around, others more obscure.
Then, there is Jakub "jimmac" Steiner. He is more know for the later Tango icons used around all kinds of software, but before that the have worked close together, with jimmac matching tigert's pallete and style.
Between 2002 and 2004 both been working at consolidating theme, but at some point it has been decided: Gnome is making generic theme:
Mar 30 2005, file entitled HACKING appears in the repo:
And it begins with these lines:
Then, On Oct 25 2005 all of the custom video and image format icons were purged from repo :(
Then starting from august 2005 icons were cleaned from Mozilla, Realmedia, KDE and at least Blender logos and some other trademarks. Kinda sad, but that's how licensing works.
Now that I think about it, back in 00's I usually put by explorer into icon mode. Because almost each new filetype had a specific icon for it did not occur to me to check what am I looking at. However with generic icons you tend to need some kind of status bar or a popover menu to know if this file is flac or an mp3. This makes it much easier to maintain, but end result looks a bit bland?
Oh, and while skimming through tigert's flicks I noticed that Nokia N800 tablet also uses a very similar icon design:
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Maybe he worked on these officially, because these go past gnome 2.15 release that happened somewhere around 2006, will need to check out.