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Working with 1-bit depth (either black or white pixels), Cox found ways to make the best of those bitmap limitations. By making background patterns stepped, the effect of ragged edges on the icons could be eliminated “Many users, for example, said they lost time having to read through the lists of commands shown on the screen, so Xerox has substituted “icons” — or command symbols. If you want Star to file something, roll the mouse and move the cursor to a picture of an appropriately labeled file folder; for storing deleted material, point to the picture of a wastebasket.” ‘Xerox xooms towards the office of the future’, Fortune, 18 May 1981, pp. 44—52
How I started Many icon designers trace the beginnings of their interest back to making sprites for video games and I’m no different. Back in 1984 our family got an Acorn Electron, a home computer based on the BBC Micro, with the added benefit of being a bit cheaper! Laughable now, but connecting it to the TV was magical: one of those moments when you feel like the future has finally arrived. My first experience of coding was with BBC Basic, creating 8×8 pixel sprites for simple games like Bugzap. As my coding skills didn’t really get much further than: 10 PRINT "HELLO",20 "GOTO10", I relied on magazines that would print the code for simple games, which I would then slavishly retype. This provided the opportunity to replace the sprites with my own designs, so that a simple driving game could become an X-Wing doing a trench run, for example. The first stage was to draw the artwork in the 8×8 grid supplied in the back of the Electron manual (in pencil, of course — this would get erased and reused many times). This was then converted into a VDU code by adding up the values of the columns in each row, as seen at the top of the next page. When I left school to study illustration and design at art college towards the end of the 1980s, I had my first experience of using a computer with a GUI: in this case, the Mac. The college was kitted out with now legendary Mac Classics, and I became aware of the groundbreaking icon work Susan Kare had done for Mac System Software 1.0.