Dasein °

Visit the IconTown Archive Version here. IconTown New Version (not online yet).

A little history talk from the author:

It was in April 1996 when I was sitting in my room staring at my computer monitor being astonished about the details and beauty of the computer icons. As I’m a person that likes to connect people I made a small illustration of a village using house icons and invited other icon illustrators to add a house and build a town. I uploaded that to a Compuserve Forum thought about a name and that was the birth of „IconTown”.

In 1997 a guy named Bodo, a projectmanager of the company where I worked as a graphic design artist, donated the domain www.icontown.de and IconTown went public. It was handcoded in the beginning which was a big part of the work. An update was a really long part of the Weekend.

The Town grew slowly and had a lot of incredible artisitic contributions. Some of them had a nice story too. The best part was a building that was illustrated by a muslimic designer and selected by a rabbi from the United States who told me that he spoke a prayer for the virtual synagogue. Another interesting story behind an icon is that the Guggenheim Building (see in the sample below) was pixeled by the guy who made a Guggenheim in Lego for Legoland/Denmark. And the project gave me the opportunity to meet and talk with a lot of persons from all over the world. Even if some contacts have only been virtual via E-Mail. Around 10.000 people contributed to this virtual town.

After 9 years I closed the server and donated the project to the „Haute École Albert Jacquard” in Belgium that the students have the chance to continue what I and around 10.000 other iconists started. The school will start a new project using the name „IconTown” and they promised to keep an IconTown archive version for documentation. You’ll be able to reach that project unter icontown.org. I still claim full copyright on the name „IconTown”.

Thanks to all who contributed to the project and I ask for your understanding that I closed the server after 9 years. I simply stopped illustrating with pixels. There are amazing follow up projects around the web who do more and cooler stuff than we did. The project was published as donationware. At the end the copyright of the little icons simply mostly was ignored. Which was a very poor development in the whole scene of pixel illustrators.

Keep in mind that 1996 was the stoneage of the web. Yahoo was a hand edited catalogue and nobody really thought about Google . So in that case we all had been the grandfathers and -mothers.

The project got international attention with articles in Spain, UK, US, Singapore, China, finally – after 7 years of being published – it even got attention in its mother country Germany in 2 magazines and a book (Taschen’s 1000 favorite websites) and was shown at the „Ars Electronica” in Linz Austria 2000 and at the CCCB in Barcelona Spain in 2001. After all the lonely hours pixel pushing behind a small computer screen these had been personal highlights to me.

Nowadays I went back to traditional illustration, graphic design work and writing concepts. Check out the rest of this website to get an overview of what I do. But I kept the holy pixel and there is a new project in development that focuses on collaborative arts.

Thanks to all!
Bernd

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