PyrusMalus | Design

Icon Design

iPaste

Of all the wonderful secrets divulged and cool technologies demonstrated at WWDC 2001 (Apple's World Wide Developer Conference) there was one thing that stood out from everything else. One that demonstrated conclusively that the Mac is the best platform around, one that would save its user untold amounts of time and effort. For deep down in one of the sessions, Apple inadvertently revealed their greatest secret project - an application that meant you'd never need to type a line of text ever again!

Well, not really. In order to spare the audience from having to watch a presenter type lines of code, they had written a small application that would take a line at a time from a separate, pre-defined, file, and allow the user to use a command-key equivalent to paste that line in to whichever document they were working on. Repeatedly typing the command-key equivalent would result in line after line of text appearing within the document, as if by magic.

This was such a useful application, that we created our own version for in-house use, and called it iPaste.

Ideas

The basic concept behind the icon, largely driven by the name, involved the use of a squirty paste bottle as the tool, and the notion of it being used to paste text into a document. This idea was initially explored using a variety of media, until it was decided that the best approach to deliver the desired visual style was to model and render the icon in 3d software.

Process

Creating the icon in 3d required the paper, bottle, and scalpel to be modelled, textured, and then rendered.

The use of a modelling package allows greater experimentation with composition, and also with textures.

The final icon was rendered from a camera angle that ensured that the icon was compatible with the Mac OS X application icon guidelines.

For further information

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