Dan Harkless' "Expand" Icon

Date:  

January 27, 1996

Tool:  

Thaumaturge Icon Editor 1.0 on an Apple Macintosh Centris 610 running Mac OS 7.1

Info:  

I had Aladdin Systems' StuffIt Expander on my Mac desktop, but the name was too long and I didn't like the icon. Therefore, I drew this icon and renamed the program "Expand". The picture depicts a scene in the bad-movie classic Godzilla vs. Megalon. In the film, a scientist creates a human-sized robot named "Jet Jaguar". The robot needs to fight the giant monster Megalon, so he conveniently grows to 500 times his original size. While looking on in amazement, the scientist muses, "It can't be! But still... I guess he realized he had to hold the monster somehow. So he just programmed himself in some way to increase his own size!".

This icon would look a bit nicer at 34x34, so that the robot's extremities could all be surrounded by the black outline, but icons are 32x32 on the classic Mac OS.

Note that on modern devices, the icon will look darker than it's supposed to (particularly on the grey parts) due to the use of an sRGB-compliant 2.2 gamma correction factor, rather than Macs' pre-2010 gamma of 1.8.