Valhalla Island

Generally I’m a huge fan of application icons in OS X but Adobe really choked with the family of CS3 icons. All together they look brilliant but if you happen to have the wrong combination of apps side by side in your dock, just like any other inharmonious colour palette, they look like shit. So I started looking for replacements.

While plenty of other people have realised the original CS3 icon set’s shortcomings and created replacements, the problem is that all the replacements suck too. Sorry Mr. Betts, I like the rest of your stuff.

Here’s a few examples of “The Best” which are all ordinary. Then there’s the competition run by Quark vs. Indesign. You just have to look at the hideous winner of that competition to be give up on ever finding a good replacement set.

But wait. Yesterday I was downloading freeware icon sets as I often do, when I came across a set that I ended up posting to Flickr with the caption - “Cute set. No practical use.” It took a good night’s sleep to dawn on me.

I thank Fast Icon for their lovely unintentional CS3 replacement icon set.