Old icons
July 7, 2026 at 9:30 PM by Dr. Drang
There’s been a lot of talk lately about Mac application icons and “squircle jail.” Inspired by this post from Paul Kafasis on the Rogue Amoeba blog,1 many Mac-adjacent people have taken up his cause to “Free the Icons.”
I agree, but Apple’s 50th anniversary has gotten me thinking a lot lately about the early days of the Mac, so it’s only natural that my mind shifted to the highly constrained icons Mac applications had back then.
In those days, icons were 32×32 pixel images, and every pixel was either black or white. The classic original Mac application icons were the ones for MacWrite and MacPaint.2
You can see that Apple liked the idea of app icons being a tilted rectangle with some image inside the rectangle to indicate what the app did. The hand was Apple’s way of telling you that this icon was for doing things, and the rectangle was tilted to match the orientation of the hand. (If you were left-handed, this was just another injustice inflicted on you by a cruel right-handed world.)
Document icons were typically upright rectangles with dog-eared corners and similar designs inside the rectangle—no hands because documents don’t do anything. But we’re not here to talk about document icons.
Other Apple app icons that fit this pattern were the ones for MacDraw and HyperCard:
The HyperCard icon was a bit of a departure, in that it had a stack of rectangles, but the idea was the same. There was no image on the top card of the stack, probably because there wasn’t enough room.
Many of the complaints about squircle jail are about the loss of icon elements that “stick out” from the rest of the design. As you can see, this idea was there from the very start; the hands stick out from the tilted rectangles.
Most other software publishers followed Apple’s lead. Here are the icons for Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress:
Aldus had a slightly different idea for what the hand should look like.
It’s important to recall that the Mac didn’t have a Dock back then. You launched an app by finding its icon on your disk and double-clicking.3 The icon always had the name of the app underneath it, which was good. If you had both PageMaker and XPress, I imagine it would be easy to confuse such similar icons in a Dock.
The folks at THINK took a slightly different approach for their Pascal editor/compiler. They kept the idea of hands, but because nobody programs with a pencil, they put two hands on a keyboard and showed them generating a flowchart:
Other publishers abandoned either the hands or the tilted rectangle or both. As people got more used to working with Macs, these clues for what’s an app and what isn’t became unnecessary, and icon design became less constrained. Even Apple gave up on them for utilities like Disk First Aid and Font/DA Mover:
And there was, of course, my favorite Apple icon of this era, the one for ResEdit:
This is what old-timers mean when they talk about Apple and whimsy.
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As opposed to his wonderful personal blog, One Foot Tsunami. ↩
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All of the icon images in this post are screenshots taken from an Infinite Mac session. ↩
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Yes, you could also launch an app by double-clicking on the icon of one of its documents. But I told you we’re not here to talk about document icons. ↩
Indiana jewel box bank
July 2, 2026 at 7:50 PM by Dr. Drang
I visited my eighth and final Louis Sullivan jewel box bank yesterday morning. The Purdue State Bank (now a Chase branch) is in West Lafayette, Indiana. As a graduate of the University of Illinois, I have thoughts about Purdue University and its substandard engineering program, but I will keep those thoughts to myself and focus on the bank.
This is the north side of the bank. The thoroughly incompatible stone addition to the building was (according to Wikipedia) built in the 50s, but I must say the original brick and terra cotta portion of the building is in excellent shape. I don’t know when Chase took over, but they’ve done a great job with the old exterior.
A fun thing about the bank is that it’s wedge-shaped. Here’s an aerial view I pulled from Apple Maps:
The narrow west side of the building used to be the entrance, but it’s now an ATM.
You may be surprised to learn that I don’t find this sacrilegious. It’s a reasonable reuse of a part of the building that wouldn’t make sense as an entrance anymore, and they’ve preserved the glazed terra cotta around it. The signage, though, is awful. Maybe Chase felt the big empty space above the old entrance—which presumably had “Purdue State Bank” removed long ago—didn’t look right without its branding. Wrong.
There are some very nice details around and above the windows. Here’s a closer look at the north side:
And here are essentially the same details on the south side, where the sun didn’t create such harsh shadows:
The shade on the south side also allowed a decent view of the sides of the pillars between the windows.
I have no photos of the interior because it was terribly disappointing. I knew the east half of the building would be generic, but I thought they might have preserved something of the original in the west half. But as I turned right after going through the doors, I saw that wasn’t the case. The entire interior is just white painted drywall and LED lighting. The only thing that sets it apart from any other Chase branch is that the offices in the west half are noticeably squeezed together.
Given the care taken to preserve the exterior, I suspect the interior had been defiled before Chase took over, and there was nothing left in there to care for. That’s a shame, and it was an unfortunate way to end my visits. But the exterior was really nice and certainly worth the trip.
One last thing: Are you surprised to see the Sun hitting the north side of the building? I confess I was. But after thinking about it, it made sense. First, my visit was on July 1, less than two weeks after the summer solstice, which means the Sun rises pretty far north of due east. Second, we’re in Daylight Saving Time, which means the bank’s opening time of 9:00 AM is closer to sunrise than it would be if we were on Standard Time. Finally, West Lafayette is just east of the boundary between the Eastern and Central time zones, and I live just west of the boundary. I’m used to sunrise happening nearly an hour earlier (in local time) than it happens in West Lafayette.
Of course I couldn’t leave it at that. I fired up Mathematica and used its SunPosition function to figure out where the Sun was in the sky when I took that photo (9:22 AM EDT) of the north side of the bank:
As you can see, the Sun’s azimuth, the first item of the result, was about 85°, making it slightly north of east. The same calculation (with the same result) can be made on the web using the NOAA Solar Calculator.
Ohio jewel box bank 2
July 1, 2026 at 5:01 PM by Dr. Drang
Yesterday I visited the Home Building Association Bank in Newark, Ohio, a Louis Sullivan jewel box bank built in 1914. It’s currently owned by the Licking County Foundation (oh, grow up), which restored it at considerable cost over several years and reopened it to the public last fall.
As you can see from the photo above, the Old Home differs from the other jewel box banks in that its exterior is clad entirely in terra cotta—it’s not mostly brick with terra cotta accents. But the accents still manage to stand out.
Let’s not forget the lions, which we’ve seen before. Like the Sidney and Grinnell banks, this one has a protective lion with wings and a shield.
And like the Sidney bank, it has a couple of lion heads with pipes in their mouths to drain rainwater.
The pipes could be a little more subtle.
This is a pretty small building, so when you walk in the door on the east side, you’re put in a fairly narrow space.
Not as narrow as it used to be for visitors to the bank. Near the entrance is this photo from the early days, showing how the teller areas took up the northern half of the space:
The serpentine flooring that runs east-west along the south half of the building is original, which you can see if you compare the vein patterns in my photo and the old one.
The stenciling on the ceiling and walls is mostly original, as evidenced by the discoloration and missing paint in some areas.
The colored window panels on the south wall are original, as are the mechanisms that used to open them. The panels don’t open now because we have air conditioning, and it’s better to keep them sealed.
The benches and check-writing desks along the south wall are original and were found in the building’s basement.
I find the detail on the post highly reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright:
Wright worked for Sullivan early in his career but had been gone for over twenty years by the time the Old Home was designed. I don’t know if this was a typical Sullivan detail or whether he was being influenced by his former apprentice.
The basement currently has a handful of old building artifacts: pieces of broken terra cotta, original lighting fixtures, doorknobs, alarm bells, teller cage grills, and safe deposit boxes.
There’s also an odd panel with wiring (at the bottom of the second photo) that looks a lot like a printed circuit board.
Finally, in the Foundation’s office space on the second floor is this gorgeous Sullivan drawing of the building’s south elevation:
Fun fact: the original boiler room was just outside the footprint of the building, under the sidewalk that ran along the east side. Second fun fact: the locker doors shown in the Women’s Room at the west end of the basement are still in the basement but currently decorating a wall.
The building’s drawings are at the Ryerson and Burnham Library at the Art Institute. They’re digitized and available to download, but at a pretty low resolution. Too bad.
Ohio jewel box bank 1
June 29, 2026 at 9:42 PM by Dr. Drang
Last year, around Labor Day, I visited five of Louis Sullivan’s jewel box banks:
- Farmers and Merchants Union Bank in Columbus, Wisconsin
- National Farmers’ Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota
- Henry Adams Building in Algona, Iowa
- Merchant’s National Bank in Grinnell, Iowa
- People’s Savings Bank in Cedar Rapids, Iowa
These all fit in with a little driving circuit that included visiting my daughter and my younger son. This year, I headed east to pick up the last three.
This morning’s bank was the People’s Federal Savings and Loan Association in Sidney, Ohio. Despite what that Wikipedia page says, it’s now operated by F&M Bank, which bought out People’s in 2022. You can sort of tell by the large but tasteful “F&M Bank” lettering on the front (north) façade.
F&M could have used a font in which their F was a better match to the F in the original THRIFT lettering, but you can’t expect bank executives to notice things like that. At least they didn’t go with the sans serif font they use in their logo. The horizontal line of slightly damaged bricks is where the old name of the bank used to be.
The bank was built in 1917, which puts it second to last in the sequence, younger than all the other jewel boxes except the Farmers and Merchants Bank. The date of construction is prominent on the west façade.
You’ll probably need to zoom in to see the date; it’s not only small, but I was shooting into the sun, so the contrast isn’t great. The 1886 date you see at the left end is when People’s Federal Savings and Loan was founded.
While we’re on the west side, let’s check out some of the details.
The lion with the shield on top of a pilaster is at the southwest corner of the building, off the right edge of my west façade photo. You may recognize him—he’s basically the same as the entranceway lions at the Merchant’s National Bank.
Each of the lion heads that appear along the bottom of the windows has a copper pipe in its open mouth. Clearly this is to drain rainwater that collects on the sills, although I don’t know if the pipes are still working. Sullivan undoubtedly considered this a “form follows function” thing.
Most of the decorative elements on this building are organic, but there are geometric features along the cornice at the top of the building and around the arch on the north façade.
Sullivan “signed” this building in the architrave above the entrance. Not just in the little LOUIS SULLIVAN ARCHITECT in the lower left corner, but in the big stylized LSA at the center of the piece.
Just inside the entrance is the landmark designation plaque.
After seeing the lovely exterior, I have to say I was a little disappointed when I went through the foyer into the interior. It’s nice enough, but I was ready to be hit by something like the interior of the National Farmers’ Bank. No such luck. The lines are clean, there’s a good view of the west windows, and there’s a gorgeous skylight running down the center of the ceiling, but no murals or hanging lights.
One of the tellers told me there used to be stencils of some sort running along the tops of the walls, but they were painted over. An odd decision, given how well the rest of the building has been preserved, but maybe they couldn’t be saved—or weren’t original.
Another small disappointment was the lack of documentation. Other banks had small shrines to their buildings, with displays of drawings, old photographs, or even pieces of original terra cotta and brickwork. F&M had a little pamphlet and a visitors’ signature book, but that was it.
I don’t want to be too hard on this bank. It really is beautiful and in great shape. I guess my expectations for the interior were just too high after walking around and photographing the north and west façades. F&M can’t be blamed if the previous owner didn’t keep the original drawings. Also, it’s a pretty small space—no second floor or mezzanine for a shrine.