Won'tyoutakemeto...Icontown!
by kenray

Icon designers are a breed apart. The 32 x 32 pixel palette is not a place where every artist feels comfortable. Thusly, those who excel at it get much recognition and apreciation from "the rest of us".

The icon is the first line of skinning, the "common denominator" of all operating systems, an almost totemic expression of identity and artistry packed into such a limited, tiny space. You can spend a whole day looking thru collections, and many of us keep hundreds of them at our disposal.

And so, with such a great personal respect for the art, and such a great love of the material, it was a pure joy to discover Icontown.

Icontown is a great collaborative work of many icon designers. The simple concept is this: Build a town out of icons... The construction of the town has been lovingly and meticulously overseen by Berndt Lastname, with "contributing architects" from all over the world.

(You simply must see Icontown to beleive it. Click here to open
the IconTown "Townview Page", if you like, before reading on with this interivew.)

Tek: Please tell us a bit about yourself..age, location, profession, education.

Be: i am 33 years old. i studied graphic-design, illustration, communication design, information design and typography combined withcourses in perception theory.

i am located in frankfurt germany and established my own design office in 1998 after working as a freelance designer/illustrator for around 8 years. this small design office has now grown to be
a real company for new media solutions (http://neue-k.de).

Tek: How did you get started with icon town? and was the project meant to be an "open collaboration" from the start, or did things just work out that way?

Be: Icontown was, from the very first, an invitation to take part in building a town. it's the main concept of icontown. that's what it's built for...

one day in the mids of the 90s i made a screenshot and studied the details of that image. i was faszinated by the effekt of zooming in and out. seing the big pixels and seeing the pixeled pictures in
the original size. clean and nice. i really was impressed.

it was at the beginning of a weekend. and i was bound to the monitor for four days. trying to pixel everthing i could. from that day on i was addicted to the pixel.

(think about 1995 and internet. there were just a very few search engines. yahoo, altavista. they had only a few websites in their databases. it was like the mediaval ages. few content bad indexed.

link pages had been the most important bookmarks to find other pages inside the www. what a time. but you asked when icontown starts. and that was one of the main ideas - a place to link other icon designers using the image of a town and icons of houses.)

It all started in April 1996 - I created an icon of a house (the IconTown logo). Some days later I talked with a friend about icons, color palettes, tools, etc.

We were a little sad that there was no way to "meet" other icon artists to share ideas and thoughts concerning icon design. Several days later I sent a house icon (the IconTown logo) combined with a road and a tree icon to a friend of mine and invited him to take part in building a town made of
icons. This was the birth of IconTown.

He encouraged me to keep the idea of inviting other icon designers, and I started to work out the rules for IconTown. I uploaded this first IconTown set to the CompuServe network, and after one month I had three citizens.
After a while I realized that there were not enough icon designers online at CompuServe, so I made the first IconTown Home page and published it on the World Wide Web - this was around june or July 1996.

That was the beginning of IconTown. It was a simple idea and the right time to start. And thanks to the encouragement of my friends I did it.
And I won't miss to thank all the people who linked this Town in the beginning (Many thanks to Ged of the Iconfactory, his link helped a lot to become the first visitors. Thank you, Ged!) and to all who contributed somany wonderful icons and ideas to this project.

Tek: I have noticed that your next update is in July, and the previous update was in May...is this the typical time span between "growth spurts" in icon town?

Be: in the past, icontown was realized weekly. for the reason that i did all the work in my sparetime sometimes there were no updates or delayed updates cause of the simple fact that i don't had any spare time.

now we are working on an automated update. that means your icon will be shown on the plot of your choice after the construction office accepted your building. Also, that will mean we'll have daily updates!

you can imagine that i would like to have that feature online tomorrow. but we will need an additional month to get this online.

so hopefully at the first of september we will have this done.

Tek: How many people work "behind the scenes" at Icon Town?

Be: icontown was a "one-man-show" from 1996 til today. i did the whole work alone. the concept, the logo, the rules, the special design of icontown, ... so i am founder of icontown, mayor, councillor, employee...

now, as icontown starts to get interactive parts, a friend of mine named jan joined the council and is working on the php4 scripting and database programming behind the scenes. this really helps a lot. in the past everything was worked out via e-mail. now, the citizens canchange their details/icons themselves.

jan and i are working on the icontown project in our sparetime. we are earning our money in other projects. icontown itself is a non-profit project. free fun for us and the citizens. the bad aspect of that is
that if we both don't have sparetime there will be no updates.

Tek: Do you use mac or win, and what program/process do you use to design icons?

Be: i prefer working on apple macintosh computers.

in the days i started using computers there were only amiga and apple macintosh computers around. and i really think the "gui" of win 95 up to 2000 is not that clearly structured than the "gui" on macs, but thats an individual preferance.

about the software i use. well that's not that easy. i use icon machine, res edit, photoshop, iconbuilder, graphic converter and color it. depends on what i like to do. if i can use it to push
pixels around i use it.

Tek: Who are some of your favorite icon authors/websites?

Be: etherbrian is my alltime favorite, hideki itoh, talos tsui, moszko garash and calle rehbinder. there are a lot more i like to mention, but you asked for my favorites.

Tek: Some of the building at icon twon are really really impressive, please point out a few of your faves, and tell us a bit about them...

Be: if you take a look in the upper left part of the townview, you can see a memorial-like icon. that is the bodo wewer memorial.
bodo was a project manager in a small new media company i worked in as a freelance.

he donated the domain for free. there are a lot more to mention. do you have a special icon or icons you are interested in?

Tek: Has IT gotten much attention from the press?

Be: oh, sure! there was an early article at the end of 97 on the macaddict website. and if you visit the pressroom you can see a list of publications. macworld, the face, cyberpais, create online, and so on ...also, icontown was part of the ars electronica in sept 2000 (an exhibitionof digital arts in austria).

Tek: As an international project, is language ever a barrier?

Be: nope. not really. most people speak english and most are able to understand my german english (i call it germish).

Tek: I notice your site says "the original"...are there copycat villages?

Be: there had been matthew kelley with his mactown. but he left the scene because he was bothered that people claimed his work and made it their own. i invited him to join the icontown council but he stopped publishing art in the web.

Tek: What does the future hold for icon town?

Be: there is a lot!

there will be a message system to send and receive mails within icontown or outside (comparable to a webmail system), there will be a townview that will update itself daily, there will be multiple townparts (an industrial area, an airport, a beach area, a business town, and so on) there will be votes for mayors in the different townparts, there will be the option to stay in touch with the other citizens via a service like the aol messenger or icq.

and there will be the historical icontown like you know it today.

and as the web started, icontown is open for collaborations and partnerships and donations.