Dave Brasgalla is one of the most celebrated and popular Mac artists, known for his dozens of free icon sets at the Iconfactory, and desktops, fonts, and sound sets at his homepage, Pixelhuset. Today, he works at the Iconfactory and Marmalade Moon art studio with his fiancé Kate England in Stockholm, Sweden, creating commercial works for the Iconfactory as a career and freeware sets for the community on the side. In this Insider, we find out more about the World of Dave Brasgalla, and find out how he got started, the process involved in making one of his icons, and his thoughts on themes.

MacThemes: Tell us about yourself! Where do you live? Is graphic design your primary job? What got you interested in this field? When did you start drawing? Or pushing pixels?

Hey, that’s five questions in one! Okay, I’ll try to answer them all and keep it short: I am 40 years old and live in beautiful Stockholm, Sweden, where my fiancé Kate England and I maintain an art studio. It’s half Iconfactory and half Marmalade Moon. Graphic design, and indeed icon design, is our main job and has been for about 5-6 years now. I’ve drawn and painted since I was old enough to hold a crayon. I took art classes in high school (my school had a particularly good art program), then attended the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale. I dropped out mid-way to accept a full-time position as a staff artist at Motorola. That’s where I first managed to get my hands on a Macintosh (my best friend had an Apple IIe, but we mostly played Castle Wolfenstein on it!). Since we made the chip, Motorolans got first dibs on some of the low serial number Mac 128Ks. Our department obtained one and I was on it directly. I did a quick picture of Yoda in MacPaint and wowed my boss. I wish I still had that picture!

After Motorola, I worked at a variety of advertising agencies and was the art director of a jazz magazine for a short run. During this period, most productions were still being done traditionally - cut and paste, ruby liths, POS cameras, etc. I was away from Macs for most of System 6’s development. When I moved on to working at the University of Florida, they were doing print production on Macs, so they set me up with a nice new Quadra 800. This was around 1994, and System 7.1. The first thing I noticed was that one could now set custom icons - something that was difficult to manage under System 6. I spent a lot of time opening system folders and examining all the cool new color icons. I discovered a little extension called Zipple, which let one make and use animations in the menu bar. That got me doing a lot of “pixel click”. I also found an app called Icon Boss and made a few custom icons for my hard drive with that. There was another icon app that never got out of beta that I used for a while, but I can’t remember the name - Aurora? Eventually, I ended up with ResEdit, which was so simple to use - and never crashed! I stayed with ResEdit right up until the advent of OS X icons.

Those first 128k Macs cost about 1600-1800 USD at the time, and there was no way I could afford that as a kid just starting out in the workplace. It wasn’t until ‘96 that I went ahead and bought a used SE30 for about 200 bucks. Early icon sets like “Literary 007″ and “Solar Patrol” all had their start in black and white on the SE30, and then I colorized them at work on my lunch hours. Shortly after that, I got a good deal on a Performa 475 from a co-worker. With my first big paycheck from the Iconfactory, I bought a brand-new, first-run iMac, which was just a dream machine at the time. I remember Ged, Talos and Corey calling me up that day - “What’s it like? What’s it like?”. I still have that iMac - it runs our scanner and printer under Panther, but it’s getting pretty beaten up these days. Actually, I still have the SE30 as well!

MacThemes: Icon design seems to be your main interest, and you release most of your icons through the Iconfactory. What are the advantages to joining such a group of artists?

That’s somewhat difficult to answer, if one views the question in terms of the current state of the Internet and computing in general. One has to consider that when I first began my association with the Iconfactory in ‘97/’98, and indeed when it was founded by Corey, Talos and Ged in 1996, the landscape was quite different than it is now. The “World Wide Web”, as it was still known, was barely a few years old. In fact, the first time I used the web (with Mosaic!) there were less than two thousand web pages extant. In that context, being a group of artists releasing icons at a central location helped raise awareness of custom icon art and artists. Most custom icons were available at that time through Info-Mac and similar FTP sites, and good ones were not so common. The Iconfactory had the advantage of being the first group of icon artists to really set up a proper shop on the Web and produce high-quality work on a regular basis. Some well-timed plugs on former Apple employee Guy Kawasaki’s now-defunct “EvangeList” Macintosh mailing list helped get the word out, and we’ve always had good support from the Mac press.

Aside from the fact that they are all good friends and fine human beings, joining up with Ged, Talos, Corey and Craig let me share in their well-established high profile and their solid industry contacts. I also learned a hell of a lot from them. Mastering Copland angles, learning to do portrait icons, working with developers, clients and end-users - it has been an education in itself. Having the range of styles that we had, we were able to take on many different kinds of design jobs, and further diversify our portfolio. We all worked unbelievably hard, but it has really paid off - both in terms of the stability of the company today and in having the luxury of working for ourselves. We’d all had pretty much our fill of working for big corporations, and yet it was that corporate and agency experience that helped us make a go of things on our own.

Now we’ve got new artists coming in, people like Anthony Piraino and David Lanham, and we’re really excited about that. They have their own distinctive styles, which strengthens our repertoire and keeps things fresh. We’re in great shape, but I’m not sure how it would be to start such a venture up today, with everyone still so skittish about IT companies. Many artists and design groups have had a long time to get firmly established, so it might be harder to make it happen. Getting there first can often make a decisive difference.

MacThemes: So is the Iconfactory located at a central office, or do you guys do your work from home? Our beloved themer, Max Rudberg, recently joined Marmalade Moon as an intern. Do you see him at work?

Yes, we all have work places. We have the main office in Greensboro, NC, which is rapidly being outgrown. They are overseeing the construction of new, larger offices right now. Craig Hockenberry is currently outfitting a space in Laguna Beach, CA to be the main programming center. Kate and I share the studio here in Stockholm, where Max is interning this summer. The space used to be a meat and milk shop in the 30’s. It’s built in the style Swedes call “Funkis”, meaning functional, which we really like. And yes, I see Max every day. I don’t really have any exciting stories to tell about the studio - we just work away, and it’s peaceful and quiet. We have a nice view over Lake Mälaren. Lots of bird and animal life around.

MacThemes: Is the Iconfactory a source of income? Your icon sets are released for free; what keeps you pumping out such gorgeous, comprehensive collections?

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