For those new to the Mac customization scene, William Bart is one of the more interesting and controversial characters whose work you’re likely to encounter. An accomplished commercial designer and illustrator by trade, his extensive BBX theme designs are widely considered to be some of the best non-commercial GUI work ever released. His attention to detail and overall sense of style are the kind of stuff that make enthusiast’s heads spin and critics foam at the mouth. In fact, you’re likely to see his influence in the work of many up-and-coming theme designers on both platforms, in commercial interfaces for everything from websites to video games and (as rumor has it) perhaps even within Aqua itself. Curved buttons, realistic glossy surfaces, translucency, directional lighting with drop shadows - all stuff William and others were doing with the OS9 utility Kaleidoscope long before Aqua was revealed.

Although he hasn’t released anything for the Mac in over two years, he remains well-known and maintains a level of collaboration with today’s most prolific and popular OSX theme developers. Max Rudberg, arguably the most well-known Mac OS X theme designer, has even ported William’s BBX MERCURY™ Futuristic GUI Overlay Kit to the OS X platform. The precursor to the extensive ’skin suite’ concept that’s taken hold on the Windows platform recently, BBX Mercury was released way back in 2001 - yet still enjoys considerable popularity due in part to dozens of ports and adaptations for Windows (even PDAs and cell phones) in addition to the interpretation by Max. To say that it remains one of the most popular themes of all time is no exaggeration.

To some he’s the equivalent of a GUI rock star, to others he’s just a guy who hasn’t released a Mac theme in over two years. But whatever your take on William Bart might be, it’s hard to deny the fact that he’s a force to be reckoned with. MacThemes’ Phill Ryu recently chatted with him for some insight into his perspective on things and what the near future holds for BBX fans…

MacThemes: What got you started as a graphic artist?

BBX: My dear old dad is a commercial artist - I grew up surrounded by graphics, typography and illustration… I guess I’ve been a creative monster from a very young age.

MacThemes: Were there any occupations or talents before this?

I’ve starved as a painter, struggled as a cartoonist and eventually thrived in advertising.

MacThemes: So you’ve done agency work?

BBX: Yeah, until just recently I was working as a creative director with one of the world’s top promotional agencies. I had an ‘edge’ in that I did everything myself - my own concepts, my own copy, layouts and design, illustration, photo shoots - just one of these hypercreative freaks who does it all I guess. I think I was pretty good at it - I captured big accounts, won some ad and promo awards around the world, even had headhunters for the big agencies calling me at my desk - pretty crazy stuff. But I had to put the brakes on and give up the 100+ hour work weeks or go insane trying to keep it all together. Now I’m much happier working from my home studio - and I have time for the other stuff I’ve always wanted to do - like interface design.

MacThemes: What kind of stuff did you do when you worked in advertising?

BBX: I’ve done a lot of creative work for Microsoft on Xbox (and if you’ve seen the eyes on the sides of the Xbox cube vans that drive around doing demos and events, those are actually my eyes), some Pepsi stuff (tons of branding work, developed that Wild Cherry character they had for a while), stuff for the movie studios - basically anything having to do with electronics, entertainment or junk food. I still work in advertising with the same agencies and clients, I’m just able to pick and choose now - which is nice.

MacThemes: You are a Mac customization celebrity, but you have yet to release anything for OS X. How is that?

BBX: OSX is still very young let’s not forget… And until very recently it’s been ‘less-than-fun’ to develop theme stuff for. Too many limitations in simply patching Aqua to accommodate my crazy theme designs - I just didn’t want to jump on that Aqua mod bandwagon, so rather than release lackluster themes I spent my time developing theme designs steadily over the past couple of years… All in the hopes that one day I’d be able to actually pull them off in OSX. Thanks to Jason Harris and Unsanity, the day is fast approaching whereby my designs can be fully realized on a modern Mac - which is good, because I was about to throw in the towel on skinning the Mac and jump into theming Windows just to get it out of my system.

MacThemes: That still doesn’t explain the celebrity part.

BBX: It’s kind of embarrassing now because I’ll look at my old stuff and I really cringe at most of it – the stuff I’m doing now is light years ahead of my previous UI designs. Themes and skins have really taken off over the past few years - I think I just got in there with some funky stuff at the right time. My stuff was always fairly popular, but BBX Mercury™ just exploded for some reason. I guess it’s because it had a really strong identity, was fairly different from anything that came before it and looked funky in screenshots – and despite the fact that I’d redo just about everything differently these days, I still love that logo. Now you’ll see ideas I used for my BBX stuff used everywhere - high-impact pseudo-branding with bold logo designs, teaser posters, the idea of the GUI Overlay Kit. That was all stuff I carried over from what I was doing in real life. A lot of people just seem to dig the BBX thing I guess.

I’ve also been active in the MacOSX and Windows skinning communities - and over the past two years I’ve been creating some uber-cool commercial WindowsMediaPlayer skins, so people still seem to know who I am.

MacThemes: What’s it like developing for Windows Media Player?

BBX: It’s incredibly fun – in fact, this is where I’ve been honing my skills primarily… Developing these over-the-top fully animated futuristic interfaces with a combination of 3D and photoshop has been a real blast – there’s really very little you can’t do (and there’s nothing this extensive in terms of skinnability on the Mac). I’ve done all of my WMP work with a company called The SkinsFactory – I just do the graphics, they do all the client-getting, coding and distribution. If I’m not mistaken, I think our Terminator3 skin is the supposed to be the most popular mp3 player skin of all time. I’ve never seen any of them up and running of course, on the Mac I just see animated GIF tests of the animations… They’re pretty time-consuming in that I end up doing a lot of frame-by-frame sequencing in Photoshop. There’s a lot I’d love to show off, but it’s sitting in the wings waiting for release.

MacThemes: So what does BBX stand for? What is this BBX thing anyways?

BBX: doesn’t really stand for anything - it’s just something cryptic I came up with so that people know it’s mine… It also allows me to call any of my designs anything I want to regardless as to whether or not the name’s been used already. For example, if there’s an Aurora and a BBX Aurora you’ll know and remember that they’re different things - and (if I’ve done things right) you’ll get a jump when you see those three little letters appended to something’s name.

The idea with BBX was to translate style trends, surfaces and toys I find to be technolusty into some cool designs. BBX style is generally minimalist - the entire design is generated from a limited number of ’seed’ elements, so this keeps things consistent and tight. It’s also fantasy futuristic – I want the user to feel like they’re playing with a funky new toy from the future once it’s all fired up. I’ll also use these slick photorealistic (or realistically stylized) surfaces, mono/duo chromatic color schemes and simple geometric symbols (I call them glyphs) rather than the more literal representations we’re used to being bombarded with. It seems to be a similar direction to the one (good) industrial design has been taking over the past couple of years, the same direction Apple seems to be heading in with their hardware.

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