Bryanbell.com

MarsEdit And NetNewsWire Icons

Brent Simmons' Public Betas of NetNewsWire and MarsEdit have finally been released, and I can't be happier. These two applications are the one-two punch any Mac user will need to manage their RSS Feeds weblogs.

I am particularly happy since the icons I did for the applications can finally be seen. Some of which were created early this year for Brent's new application MarsEdit. When an early beta of NetNewWire2 came out I created a few new icons to cover the features that didn't overlap with MarsEdit, so both applications would have a similar look and feel. I have now come to understand that the original set of NNW icons were done by the great Jon Hicks (the creator of the FireFox icon). That fact I find interesting because I love the firefox logo and I stared at it a great deal before creating the new MarsEdit and NNW icons. Thanks Jon for the inspiration.

Here is a sample set of icons used in both applications:

The Icons were developed over a long period of time. I wanted them to share a similar look and texture so they would look sharp living next to each other on the Dock.

The space ship took on more than a few forms. The first version was awful, and I'm really glad Brent gave me some push-back. A later version was more sleek, but the heavy outlines took away from the look, and the colors (Blue and Orange) confused beta testers who would accidently click on the Firefox icon instead of MarsEdit.

The NetNewsWire Icon had its own sordid version history. I wanted to make the satellite more recognizable for what it was. Most satellites are simple shapes, like cylinders, but all I could seem to design were things that looked like fat batteries. I created a box shaped satellite with large solar panels, but early versions looked, especially when shrunk down, like a globe with a band-aide on it. The bent wings in the final version seemed to have fixed that problem.