The series of Vintage Folder Icons is inspired by vintage textures, retro textiles and Technicolor films and bring a hint of nostalgia and glamour to your digital environment. Vintage Folder Icons go perfectly together with the popular series, Luminous Folder Icons and help you get stuff done by color coding your projects.

Vintage Winter Folder Icons

< — Save Winter Vintage Folder Icons to your computer.

Purple Grapes folder icons come in rich shades of purple, famous varieties of the finest cultivated grapes: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Rioja, Syrah and Zinfandel. Perfectly  matched with shades of purple and russet in the abstract Golden Ratio Autumn Wallpaper or with the wild and dreamy Montage Wallpaper.

The series of Vintage Folder Icons is inspired by vintage textures, retro textiles and Technicolor films and bring a hint of nostalgia and glamour to your digital environment. Vintage Folder Icons go perfectly together with the popular series, Luminous Folder Icons and help you get stuff done by color coding your projects.

Purple icons on golden ratio autumn wallpaper

< — Save New Leaf Vintage Folder Icons to your computer.

The Complete Series of Vintage Folder Icons:

Seaside
A Walk in the Park
New Leaf

With 8 folder icons in vibrant shades of green, blue and yellow, New Leaf folder icons bring a touch of a green landscape with  blue skies and a minimalist vintage touch to your desktop. Works beautifully together with Daffodil Wallpaper.

The series of Vintage Folder Icons is inspired by vintage textures, retro textiles and Technicolor films and bring a hint of nostalgia and glamour to your digital environment. Vintage Folder Icons go perfectly together with the popular series, Luminous Folder Icons and help you get stuff done by color coding your projects.

New Leaf Icons on Daffodil Wallpaper

< — Save New Leaf Vintage Folder Icons to your computer.

The Complete Series of Vintage Folder Icons:

Seaside
A Walk in the Park
New Leaf

holiday gift tags

I designed this batch of free holiday gift tags to help you put the finishing touches to your gifts. The design is inspired by vintage Christmas glass baubles and I’m sharing the gift tags with you in a printable PDF-file for you to print out, cut up and enjoy! I hope you have fun using and sharing them!

Save these gift tags to your computer.

A Walk in the Park

With six folder icons in red, orange, grey, green, yellow and brown, A Walk in the Park folder icons bring the fresh breeze of the outdoors and a minimalist vintage touch to your desktop. Also available in red, blue and sand “Seaside”.

The series of Vintage Folder Icons is inspired by vintage textures, retro textiles and Technicolor films and bring a hint of nostalgia and glamour to your digital environment. Vintage Folder Icons go perfectly together with the popular series, Luminous Folder Icons and help you get stuff done by color coding your projects.

Vintage Folder Icons: A Walk in the Park

< — Save A Walk in the Park Vintage Folder Icons to your computer.

Project. icon sketch with blueprint and hard hat

Here’s the second part of the story about a new design project I’m working on. It’s about the creative process of a new collection of icons called “Process”.

I started this design project by asking you what kind of icons would be exceptionally useful for you. Which are your recurring projects and important files and folders that you need to find at a glance? Which of your projects do you love the most?

I also started the process of my previous collections of desktop icons by asking you what kind of icons you need, what would help you get organized and find focus in your digital environment?

Each time I’ve asked you what kind of icons you’d find useful, one of the strong trends has been icons that depict tangible, vintage or retro objects to symbolize your most important or loved projects. For example, there were tons of requests for a feather quill pen for “Writing” or “Documents” and an old-fashioned vinyl LP for “Music” (both part of the Collection of Creative Desktop Icons). The vintage office equipment in the Collection of Workflow Icons is another example and so is the old book for “Resources” and leather briefcase for “Work” (both part of the Collection of Organizer Icons)

Perhaps these types of solid, vintage objects bring a tangible feeling of functionality and beauty to our rather abstract, digital environment? Holding a charm and grace that captures our emotions in a way that digital, intangible audio, text and film files don’t?

Safe. icon sketch

Here’s my sketch of an icon that represents “Safe”. A small, old-fashioned office safe.

This is where you would store documents that are really important to your self, your family or your business. I’ll be using the Safe to store my original logo files, a backup of my blog, and some other important business documents. The “Safe” icon would also make a great icon for a backup disc. What would you put in the Safe?

Urgent/Overdue/Late. icon sketch of an old-fashioned alarm clock

This is my sketch for an icon that symbolizes Urgent/Overdue/Late. A retro wind-up alarm clock with bells.

Here’s an icon with a unique silhouette that makes it stand out on the desktop so you can find it at an instant. And that’s just what you need when you’re looking for overdue or urgent projects.

One of the challenges when creating this sketch of an alarm clock, was making sure it would look good at small sizes too. I actually spent several days making new sketches of the design and testing that it would look great all the way down to the tiny size you see when you display your icons in list view. I’ll still be reworking the smaller versions, but I want the largest version to resemble the smallest version, as much as is possible without losing any of its functionality and beauty. That’s one of the most important parts of the sketching phase for a new icon project.

Another key part of the sketching phase is to create distinctive silhouettes that make it easy to locate the icon you’re looking for (I wrote about that in the first part of this series).

And last but not least, creating a family of icons where everyone is unique and has their own personality and yet you can tell that they’re family. They fit together as well as with the icons that belong with your operating system, either Windows or Mac. The icons bring a personal, designer feeling to your desktop, and without drawing too much attention to themselves, the icons help you get unstuck and organized so you can work with flow and ease through your day.

Not sure how to customize your icons? Here’s a tutorial for using icons on a Mac and here’s a tutorial for how to change the icons in Windows.

[To be continued... ]

Did you miss Part One of this series?

Vintage Folder Icons Seaside is inspired by vintage textures, retro textiles and old films and bring a touch of nostalgia and the glamour of Technicolor film to your digital environment. Vintage Folder Icons go nicely together with the popular series, Luminous Folder Icons and help you get things done by color coding your projects.

This collection of folder icons is inspired by the seaside. In red, white and sand, Vintage Seaside Folder Icons bring the ocean, marine fashion and a minimalist vintage touch to your desktop.

Inspired by the seaside and the rich, saturated palette of Technicolor film, these folder icons help you create a personal desktop environment with a hint of nostalgia. Five folder icons in colours borrowed from the seaside, red, blue and sand or On the Beach, Ocean Liner, Powder Blue Cadillac, Warm Retro Red and Red Velvet Cinema.

< — Save Vintage Seaside Folder Icons to your computer.

I’m getting ready to send out the Spring Edition of Club Marmalade Moon. This limited edition desktop wallpaper inspired by the seaside is the club special of the season.

The club special wallpaper includes versions for fullscreen and widescreen computers as well as the iPhone and iPad. I’m so excited to release my first wallpaper for the iPad!

And yes, thanks to my friends and colleagues at the Iconfactory, I’ve got an iPad, although it’s not available been released in Sweden yet! So now I’ve been able to write a tutorial for how you change the wallpaper on your iPad! Because naturally, that’s the first thing you want to do when you get a new device!

Seaside wallpaper is inspired by the promise of summer, the beach, the sea and a Technicolor inspired palette and it accompanies a new series of Vintage Folder Icons. Grainy, retro, minimalist, robust with a nostalgic twist.

So keep your eyes peeled for new desktop art!

A Bed of Roses. Collage.

New Year’s Eve will be lit by a Blue Moon and the moonlight will welcome the new year, 2010. Obviously, this only happens once in a blue moon!

As I prepared my dreamboard for the Full Moon Circle, I thought a lot about this. The Blue Moon shining as fireworks go off and the new year rings in. The passage between the first and second decade of this century.

Then I thought about the word I’ve chosen to guide me through the New Year. My word is “ease”. I thought of clouds and minimalism. But in the end my research of the word and its origin lead me to the synonym “bed of roses”, and that was irresistible! So here it is, passionate, romantic ease!