During my last year of high school, I kept a screenshot record of every time I redesigned my desktop.
It was 2009 and we were in the heydey of skeuomorphism and bespoke wallpapers made in bootlegged versions of Photoshop. MacOS Snow Leopard has just been released, featuring a glossy 3D dock stacked with richly detailed icons.
Meticulously detailed icons became the thing. The Icon Factory were at the peak of their game making bespoke icon sets . Designers like David Lanham , Anthony Piraino , and Louie Mantia were part of the team who created the official Windows XP icons , as well as plenty of pop-culture icon sets like the Wall·E and Star Trek series.
I followed this work obsessively. Every few weeks I would “redesign” my Macbook desktop with a newly found wallpaper, icon set, and layout. And then for posterity, screenshot it. This eventually led to creating my own wallpapers and icons, and heavily influenced my hyper-detailed illustration style later on.
I recently found that screenshot archive, and it is a treat! Teenage me left a series of scene-setting details in each shot – music tracks currently playing in iTunes, a CD being burned, a PDF with plane tickets, college course catalogues, a code editor featuring HTML tables (ugh), TV shows I was in the middle of binge-watching, CVs and applications for some New York Times internship I failed to land I have no recollection of this, but I’m guessing it was a photography gig. At the time I had my heart set on war photojournalism. I’m glad that didn’t last long.
It’s the millennial equivalent of a physical scrapbook – but with digital detritus rather than ticket stubs, handwritten notes, and polaroids. Looking through these, I feel overwhelming nostalgia. But also loss. I took so few. I captured so little of my digital environment. The design aesthetics of this time are mostly gone, save for a few snapshots on internet archive .
I’m still thankful for these scraps.
You can still download many of the gorgeous wallpapers and icons shown here. My favourites are from Louie , David , and the Icon Factory archives . I’m sure Pinterest is also full of assets for this kind of interior decoration.
