The File Freak app icon

I was just reminded of this story about my old buddy Nigel. About 30 years ago (yes, really!) I made a Mac app called File Freak. It was basically Spotlight before anything like Spotlight ever existed. But I needed an app icon.

Nigel was a great artist but had only ever worked in the analog world. Still, when I told him about what I needed he said he was game to try. So I (ahem) “lent” him a copy of Photoshop, and a week later, he delivered this cute icon. It was perfect!

I was so impressed that I asked him to show me his process in Photoshop. We sat down. He went to the pencil tool, set it to 1x1 px, zoomed all the way in, and started clicking on pixels one at a time. ONE FUCKING PIXEL AT A TIME. It was only a 32x32 icon (I think, at the time?), but still that’s a lot of clicks!

After I was done laughing my ass off, he said “what’s so funny?”, and I showed him the pen tool, region fills, layers, etc. He was like, “eh, I prefer my way”.