Creating Subtle Attraction on Your Mac
Wednesday
05.21.08
Making things look good without taking away from the end goal is something I focus on in every aspect of design. This is the case for everything from the furniture in my house to the icons on my Mac. For those not the least bit interested in the interior design of my modest house—no worries, we’ll skip that for today.
My focus on subtle beauty lately has been my MacBook Pro’s desktop and dock. Ever since I’ve had my first Mac, my desktop icons have been HUGE. I mean, just ridiculously large. The point of this was to avoid clutter, by leaving no room to toss my loose ends around. After many different file structures I feel my organization level is top-notch, and am comfortable sizing down the desktop icons from 6 levels above obnoxious, to reasonable. After resizing the icons I decided to put the name off to the right rather than below…which led to adding detailed information below that, and of course dropping the font size. It was Spring cleaning, but two years overdue.
After laying the smack down on my size issue I noticed something about the default leopard icons; I didn’t like them. I went out and found a number of spectacular icon sets and narrowed it down to the Leox Graphite Bundle mixed with Unified. These two sets really compliment each other when using Leox Graphite to replace all system folders and Unified to replace all drives, and CD icons.
At this point I thought my adventure was complete, until I ran across Matt Brett’s Flickr account. While browsing through some design work, I stumbled upon two other fantastic aesthetic improvements. My favorite being the stack drawers. These nifty little containers really help stacks look like more than a bunch of icons ran over by a steamroller.
The other two great finds from Matt were the Solid Wood desktop background and the Smoked Glass Dock. The last item on the list was replacing some of the Apple default icons (specifically iChat, iTunes, iCal, TextEdit and Address Book) with the Black & Blue set and a little color mod for iCal called iConiCal.
The end result of mixing these fantastic resources leaves you with a simple, sexy desktop and dock that any geek will surely fall in love with.
