July 12, 2025
I really enjoyed browsing the BMUG's CD-ROM and discovering early 80s art made in MacPaint, so I browsed all 18,000+ MacPaint images on Discmaster to see what gems I can unearth. Here is some what I found.
Would be cool to try track down some of these artists and see what they're up to these days. If they could do this type of work on those little 9-inch, 1-bit screens 40 years ago, I'd love to see what they've achieved since.
The Amiga was another computer around the same time that could do similar (arguably better) levels of computer art at home, so I think I'll explore that soon. Could be some cool stuff there!
Lots of people like this post! Here's some of the less spectacular art (e.g: not designed so much to be art in and of itself) but still cool logos, graphics, icons and the like. If you'd like to see more, just visit the wonderful Discmaster and use the search feature to find images by file type. MacPaint, MacDraw or any other old graphics program (perhaps even Photoshop files dated before 1990 or something?) should surface thousands of pieces from this era and in this style.
This is just a collection of smaller icons I liked, dumped into a single canvas:
If you'd like to create art like this there's a wonderful book called Zen & The Art of The Macintosh available on the Internet Archive that explains the techniques (and more) of the time. This book deserves a post all of its own IMHO so I won't spoil it for you:
