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Description
Prototypes
for the
BRITISH LIBRARY
Icon Set

Samantha Wright
4TH MAY, 2012.

Someone finally pestered me enough to release these! British Library is an obscenely large collection after five years of on-and-off development; to my knowledge still the only really big set targeted at a vintage look-and-feel. If you derive anything from these templates, please send your PSDs back to me so I can give you pointers on how to best use the assets, and include the derived icon in the next release.

The original icons used ITC Founders Caslon for most of the text. I have replaced this where possible with Wyld, a freely-distributable Caslon made by David Manthey. Some prototypes still contain references to other non-freely-distributable fonts, most importantly Baskerville Old Face, Linotype Caslon Open Face, and ITC Freemouse. I have included Wyld and the “Samantha Standard” font I used for 3½" diskette labels.

Included are the following:

Archive—for lossless compression file formats.
Arrow—a large simple arrow that might be useful for someone looking to turn Wingdings into an icon set (wait, I already did that...)
Book—only one cover provided, the original journal from Uru. The rest are also Uru book covers. I don’t remember the exact pan-and-tilt settings used, but this should serve as a viable template for people who want to reproduce them. I haven’t included the rest of them because that would be stretching good faith, and some of the icons in the set are already pretty tenuous as far as fair use goes.
Clipping—a simplified document meant to be a fragment of something.
Compact Disc—including all 4 colour variants in an uncollapsed, editable form.
Data Store—a magnetic disk pack from the 70s best-suited for large binary files and tape backups.
Document—a general document template, including all of the backing patterns (text, hex, music, etc.) and ten or fifteen cover symbols.
Flash Card—a memory stick.
Floppy—in both 5¼" and 3½".
Folder—including a couple of symbols from computer companies and most of the dongles shown on the regular folders.
Hard Drive—in case a new internal or external storage technology becomes popular—SSDs, maybe?
Map—a document, but wider.
Picture—including all of the content sections recommended for normal image files.
Porthole—minimal example. Preserve the effects and edge on the foreground layer for best results.
Program—minimal example. Essentially the same as a document.
Tablet—for libraries and other program binaries without a main entry point.

Have fun! And as always, feel free to ask me questions.

– Samantha

Description
Prototypes
for the
BRITISH LIBRARY
Icon Set

Samantha Wright
4TH MAY, 2012.

Someone finally pestered me enough to release these! British Library is an obscenely large collection after five years of on-and-off development; to my knowledge still the only really big set targeted at a vintage look-and-feel. If you derive anything from these templates, please send your PSDs back to me so I can give you pointers on how to best use the assets, and include the derived icon in the next release.

The original icons used ITC Founders Caslon for most of the text. I have replaced this where possible with Wyld, a freely-distributable Caslon made by David Manthey. Some prototypes still contain references to other non-freely-distributable fonts, most importantly Baskerville Old Face, Linotype Caslon Open Face, and ITC Freemouse. I have included Wyld and the “Samantha Standard” font I used for 3½" diskette labels.

Included are the following:

Archive—for lossless compression file formats.
Arrow—a large simple arrow that might be useful for someone looking to turn Wingdings into an icon set (wait, I already did that...)
Book—only one cover provided, the original journal from Uru. The rest are also Uru book covers. I don’t remember the exact pan-and-tilt settings used, but this should serve as a viable template for people who want to reproduce them. I haven’t included the rest of them because that would be stretching good faith, and some of the icons in the set are already pretty tenuous as far as fair use goes.
Clipping—a simplified document meant to be a fragment of something.
Compact Disc—including all 4 colour variants in an uncollapsed, editable form.
Data Store—a magnetic disk pack from the 70s best-suited for large binary files and tape backups.
Document—a general document template, including all of the backing patterns (text, hex, music, etc.) and ten or fifteen cover symbols.
Flash Card—a memory stick.
Floppy—in both 5¼" and 3½".
Folder—including a couple of symbols from computer companies and most of the dongles shown on the regular folders.
Hard Drive—in case a new internal or external storage technology becomes popular—SSDs, maybe?
Map—a document, but wider.
Picture—including all of the content sections recommended for normal image files.
Porthole—minimal example. Preserve the effects and edge on the foreground layer for best results.
Program—minimal example. Essentially the same as a document.
Tablet—for libraries and other program binaries without a main entry point.

Have fun! And as always, feel free to ask me questions.

– Samantha