Philipp Antoni is an accomplished graphics, icon, and web designer, notable for his work with clients like HairerSoft (creators of Amadeus Pro), Menuet, and as the creative brain behind our recent Theme For A Week Contest. We sat down with MacThemes’ resident artist to chat about his latest iconset, Anstat.

MacThemes: What were your goals in designing Anstat? Were then any obstacles you had to overcome?

Well, Anstat changed quite a bit throughout my work on it. Originally it was just an icon set for my Kromo theme (back then imaginatively titled Kromicons), with heavy metallic shading and an evil-looking red color scheme. As it evolved, it began to look chunky and unusable to me, however, so I changed it into a standard Aqua set, without any particular goals in mind. All I had was this new folder concept. The more time I spent on it, though, the more I embraced this folder style, and the set transformed into something futuristic, with a main goal of just being unique, and that’s the direction I’m trying to keep.

Now of course, it’s not easy to come up with a completely new (but still easy to recognize) concept for each icon, and I guess that’s one of the reasons why Anstat is taking so long. I’m also including multiple versions of almost every icon, partially to overcome any possible usability problems users might have, but mainly just because it’s fun.

MacThemes: Will these be Leopard ready?

I’m in the process of updating the older icons, which are missing the 512 px size. Considering Leopard is going to be released in a few days it would be foolish to not have them pixel-perfect.

MacThemes: Lastly, what about your other projects? I hear you are working on a super-secret project with MacThemes, and that you still have a few themes in the works… Anything you care to tell us?

I don’t want to give anything away about this super-secret project, since I’m sure you’ll hear more about it later on the site, but even though we’re still in an early planning phase, I can promise you it’s going to be awesome. It might just bring back the original spirit of MacThemes and everything it’s about… (Yep, it’s that great.)

The themes are an entirely different story though. Once we know all the details about theming on Leopard I’d love to finish everything I’ve begun work on, but at the moment all these other projects are taking away too much of my time. Mainly dznr.org, my little file hosting service which is undergoing a complete re-write (not accepting any registrations at the moment, sorry!) and this big client project which I’m working on with a good friend. You should hear more about these soon, so stay tuned.