Last time, we looked at the legacy icons in progman.exe. But what about moricons.dll?
Here’s a table of the icons that were present in the original Windows 3.1 moricons.dll file (in file order) and the programs that Windows used the icons for. As with the icons in progman.exe, these icons are mapped from executables according to the information in the APPS.INF file.
↫ Raymond Chen
These icons age like a fine wine. They’re clear, well-designed, easy to read, and make extraordinary good use of the limited amount of available pixels. Icons from Mac OS, BeOS, OS/2, and a few others from the same era also look timeless, and I wish modern designers learned a thing or two from these.
As late as the current Qt 5 docs, Qt has/had a list of recommended GUI design books and it includes “The Icon Book” by William Horton from 1994.
I have barely started reading the used copy I picked up, but I can say that, so far, it’s definitely “The Icon Book” in the sense that, if you want to pick up one book to learn how to do that, it’s this one. It’s not just a book about the effects of various visual decisions (eg. border vs. no border), but also about symbolic communication.
Susan Kare, probably most famous for her work on the Macintosh iconography, also worked on a great deal of icons for other companies, including Microsoft in the Windows 3.x and 95 days.
These are designed by skilled artists around the time, although some of the icons represent concepts younger generations may not understand (such as a CD or a filmstrip).
I don’t think you have to grow up with film strips to get the iconography. I’d never seen one until high school (and only because our school let the A/V guy retire before getting rid of their last few 16mm projectors) and I understood what they were from references in movies, TV shows, cartoons, etc.