Oh, we definitely have an income, and we need it - we have families and kids to provide for! Having grown from the three founding members working in their spare time to a full-fledged company with employees and offices, we still work long hours handling all the client work. There are nine full-time people and several contractors spread out over three office locations - doing icon design, writing software, managing the offices, servers and the e-commerce backend. It’s a huge amount of effort, but most people never see any of that going on. I think that for the most part, the Macintosh-using public only perceives the freeware icon aspect, but that’s perhaps one of the smallest portions of what we now do daily.

But having said that, I’d point out that spending so much time cranking out the client work can leave us really looking forward to being able to create freely. As artists, the freeware sets have become all the more important to us because of that. Ironically, we now have to do the freeware sets in our spare time, so finding the time and energy to take on an idea for a huge set can be difficult - I mean, we do need lives away from the computers! Maybe that’s why we tend to pick icon subjects we are personally interested in, rather than merely being topical. It helps keep you motivated.

MacThemes: Have you ever thought about charging for your creations at Pixelhuset? Many designers on Windows especially have started charging for their GUI works.

Sure, I’ve thought about it. I’m still considering it. Not so much that I need it to generate a profit for me, but more in terms of being able to control the distribution. I get a lot of kids reposting my desktops to places like Spymac, which truly irritates me. I mean, I spend the time and money to create and maintain a pleasant web page where you can get nice GUI work for free, no ads, no hassles of any kind - and it’s not enough for them. They have to repost it somewhere else - and half the time, they strip off my copyright statements and mis-title it! People like that make me want to go a little more “exclusive” with Pixelhuset. Maybe if people had to pay to get access to the work, they’d respect it more. Who knows? Probably not.

Pixelhuset is my little corner of the web where I don’t have to consult with anyone else, where I can do anything I want. Consequently, I’m probably over-protective of it. I also think of it as being sort of “web retro”, in the sense of a single, simple page with a listing of free GUI goodies - a bit like those old FTP archives I mentioned earlier. I like the fact that you can still go there and get things for free, but one day these people may push me too far, and the party will be over.

MacThemes: You have a lot of fans reading this interview. Maybe they’ll look out for your work at places like Spymac.

I often do get emails from people who tip me off to appropriations, which I always appreciate. And I should point out that the staff at Spymac have always been very obliging and prompt in helping me to deal with these infringements.

MacThemes: Over the past few years, you have developed a definitive style of photo-realism, showcased in your World of Aqua series at the Iconfactory. And yet, you have dabbled in other styles of art, and succeeded. (First thing that comes to mind is the rather strange but beautiful “Trinity” desktop that was released several months ago.) Can you tell us a bit about why you have chosen photo-realism as the art style of choice, and why you aren’t exploring other styles more freely?

Actually, I think of it more like I took a diversion into photo-realism that has lasted several years. I’ve worked in a lot of styles over the years - comics, traditional painting, etching, things like that - but not all of them were easy to employ with 32×32 icon art. Creating desktop art at my personal site was a way I could play around with those ideas and techniques. 128×128 icons opened things up for new approaches, although I had an uncertain beginning with them. If you look at the first World of Aqua set, it’s quite different and much less realistic than what I am doing now. None of us at IF really knew how we were going to approach OS X icons in the beginning, so it’s been more of a progression for me, a slow evolution into my current stye. My initial 128×128 icon designs in the weeks leading up to World Of Aqua 1 were actually in a totally different direction. They were very much in the spirit of design giants like Paul Cassandre and the Stenberg brothers - very constructivist and stylised, with their own unique set of perspectives. I may revisit that style, now that I am much more confident about handling Aqua icons. I’ve got several other stylistic diversions simmering on the back burner, for when the time is right.

Right now, I am very happy working within the Aqua guidelines, simply because I like the results I’m getting. I love working with textures and surfaces, so I enjoy being able to apply them at a desktop level. Computer interfaces can be rather cold, so I feel it’s nice to have more organic forms and sensibilities finding their way onto my screen. I think the continued popularity of the old outlaw Copland theme “Drawing Board” is a good example of how well people respond to this approach.

Another reason I like to work within the guidelines is that it makes all my icons fit well in the system by default. If I do something in a different style, like Ravenswood Revisited or the eWorld series, they can really stick out next to Aqua icons. It creates this instant need to fill out an entire system replacement if one wants a thoroughly consistent look, and I am rarely interested in that. By working inside Aqua, I don’t have to worry about stylistic consistency, and I can focus purely on subject matter.

I feel “photo-realism” is perhaps not quite the right label to describe what I am trying for, but it’s almost as if I had to go *through* photo-realism to get to the real result. The quality I am looking for now is slightly more ephemeral, and often tricky for me to achieve. Obviously, just using photographs for icons usually looks jarring and sort of cheap, although occasionally I’ve seen it done well. Using 3D apps can easily lead to the same effect. I suppose a better term for what I want might be something like “magic realism” - iconic objects grounded in reality with a true sense of volume and gravity, but also imbued with a certain sheen or overall aura that makes them really feel like they belong in a Mac OS. The icon looks real, but it also looks “Mac”. It’s hard to put into words, but I know it when I see it.

One last thing I’d like to say about the current style of my freeware icon work is that I realize that I’ve progressively moved away from true “iconography”, or simple symbols and easily understood meanings, and into the realm of pure illustration. They’ve really become small-scale paintings, and they are often not practical at all from a usability standpoint. The symbol on a bathroom door is an icon. My cave troll is just a nice little painting of a cave troll, for whatever that’s worth!

MacThemes: Your icons definitely fit in OS X, a system in which Apple’s own artists have created their own “magic realism” icons from the start. But for many artists, this style, or even just photo-realism, is very difficult to achieve. What have you learned about over the years? Could you guide us through the process of making a World of Aqua icon?

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