Whether you’re a new visitor to MacThemes or a long-time reader, you might be familiar with the name Jonas Rask. As a designer, Rask has been responsible for some of the best icon creations over the last few years, with an immense portfolio of both freeware and professional work. Most notably, the Danish resident artist worked with Microsoft’s MacBU last year on the icons for Office 2008, along with Philipp Antoni of Enhanced Labs. Luis Sosa had a chance to discuss Jonas’ life as an icon artist, work with Microsoft, and his plans for the future.

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In 2002, Panic and the Iconfactory released CandyBar, the first OS X app to bring safe icon customization to Mac users. Now at version 3, this once-tiny app is now an essential tool for anyone interested in giving their Mac a facelift. So to celebrate five years of CandyBar- and four years of MacThemes- we are proud to present a special insider dedicated to one of our favorite Mac applications, the companies behind the solution, as well as the customization world around them.

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We at MacThemes love to shapeshift our computers with innovative designs and beautiful themes, but sometimes we just need to return to our interface roots. Mac OS X Leopard, released on the 26th to eager Mac users everywhere, looks to be the greatest version of Mac OS X released yet, with a brand new Aqua sitting on top of 300+ innovations. For a five year-old theme, Aqua has been given a significant facelift, and the myriad of revisions will leave the majority of Aqua aficionados very satisfied.

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David Lanham is one of the most popular Mac designers today, best known for his icons and illustrations on his website, his two themes Amora and Somatic, and the designs for sites My Dream App and MacThemes 2.0 (along with Renato Valdés Olmos). He currently works at the Iconfactory, creating freeware icons as well as commercial designs for clients like MacPractice, Sybase and Microsoft Xbox 360. Austin Heller and Sam Gwilym of MacThemes sat down with David to get a closer look at his life as a designer, his thoughts on desktops, and his opinions on Aqua and other themes.

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At this year’s keynote we were presented with a completely overhauled UI. From a semi-transparent menubar and unified windows to 512 x 512 icon states and a revamped dock, Apple presented us with a wide variety of new UI features for Leopard. Following the Keynote, we rushed to grab hold of someone capable of dissecting Apple’s new direction, so we turned to our very own GUI guru, Renato Valdés Olmos of Atacama Design to do just that. Renato brings us this month’s Insider. Feel free to digg it!

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For our first new Insider, MacThemes sat down with Michael Gonzalez, Edward Scherf, Philipp Antoni, Jonas Rask, and Joshua Pyles of the relatively new design group, Enhanced Labs. Founded in 2002, Enhanced Labs has been rapidly accumulating an impressive portfolio, talented designers, and words of praise from happy customers. Phill Ryu and Johnny Komisar of MacThemes sat down with the staff over at Enhanced Labs to discuss their company, their success in the design world, and all things GUI.

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Maybe you are a regular visitor of MacThemes, who has been coming by since our first teaser came up. Or perhaps you stumbled here without ever having heard of the site or its community before. Either way, at some point, you must’ve wondered how websites like this one are made. The story of this website’s creation may not contain the drama of large scale or high profile projects such as Amazon or Google, but it has twists (Xthemes?!), community celebrities (BBX, Adam Betts, Max, Swiz, Carbon, Jason, and more!), heated arguments, and a mad rush to the deadline of its own. This is the story of MacThemes. It began in November of 2003….

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Rick Patrick is the artist behind Vanilla Soap, creating icons, desktops, and recently themes for fellow Macintosh users. Though he began graphic design only five years ago, fiddling with Fireworks for school websites and IT work, there’s no doubt that his recent creations are on the same ground as works by other older, more experienced artists, which is even more incredible considering Rick’s current addiction to Halo. It’s not hard to predict that the 19 year old Rick will soon become one of the best OS X themers to date, especially after soon upgrading his aging eMac to a more worthy iMac G5. Here to talk about GUI customization and his newest work, Niqu, is Rick Patrick.

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