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NeXTSpirit

I’ve always liked icons, make some occasionally for my personal use.
I like especially old systems ones, from Mac OS Classic of course, but others too,
Like BeOS, NeXTSTEP.
Always found NeXTSTEP to have the most elegant interface of all, with that very sober windows and buttons style, yet beautifully detailed icons. This contrast works surprisingly well.

The icons are very interesting, you can see they are from a time of rising computer graphics possibilities, the designers used these to try to make « photo-realistic » icons. With possibility to add transparency to their 48×48 icons, i think NeXT started that trend that continued into Mac OS X to culminate with « Retina » hires 1024×1024 icons.
See the official OS X Human Interface Guideline, some quotes : « Give your app icon a realistic, unique shape… » , « Create an idealized version of the subject rather than using a photo… », all these apply to the NeXTSTEP icons up to the Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks ones.

Funnily enough, now that we have reached a state of almost no limit in term of CG possibilities, the trend is to « simplify », starting with IOS 7 icons, and now the more flat look of 10.10 Yosemite slowly moving away from the skeuomorphic look.

Anyway , the real NeXT icons you can find are 48×48 sized, of course it looks awful in 10.9, so wanted to have some in hires. imagine a « Retina » NeXTSTEP system :) Hence this NeXTSpirit icon set.

All these completely inspired by the work of Keith Ohlfs, original maker of NeXT system icons, all credit to him.
Note the PReV icon was kindly adopted by the developers of the Previous emulator.

Making the NeXT… in that case the PReV cube.Note it is in fact a twisted cube, to the up/right, to get that false perspective on the logo.
The one included in this pack is another version with different fonts.

Most modeled and rendered in Blender 2.70, post in Photoshop.

I ran into a problem doing when converting my .iconset folders into .icns retina icon files. When using OSX iconutil command to make it , it always darken and contrasted my 1024×1024 PNGs. see the difference here :

A Bug ? Was i doing something wrong ?
Funnily , if doing only 512×512 .icns icons ( not including the « …@2X » PNGs in the .iconset folder), it makes icons with the correct colors…
Anyway the only walk-around i’ve found was to lighten all my 1024×1024 PNGs , to the average values of +40 brightness and -30 of contrast to get the correct result for 1024×1024 .icns. Note on some of the images with lots of dark values, i had to brighten even more up to +80, this was the case for the NeXT and PReV logos and the Black terminal…

So I’ve done two sets , one 512×512 only and one Retina. I have found anyway that some time retina icons just don’t show on older systems like Panther or Tiger.

Here for the Retinas ( 40 MB even though it’s a compressed image !) :
NeXTSpirit-RETINA.dmg

And here for the 512×512 :
NeXTSpirit-512.dmg

Feel free to redistribute, but if so, please leave the set complete together with this Readme. Thanks.
For non-commercial and only personal use of course.