Ancient Web: The Iconolog Catalogued Thousands of Tiny Pictures in 1995

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

The tiny image in the corner of a computer application used to be a thing people collected by the thousands. The Iconolog took that impulse seriously enough to become a library.

Explore The Iconolog.

Its homepage announces an online launch at midnight on December 31, 1995. It describes itself as a collection devoted to the 32-by-32 icon and the art of iconography. In the surviving index, the GIF collection is listed at 7,419 icons, while the original Windows ICO collection claims 22,963 items in a 16-color palette.

Those are the archive's own historical counts, not figures recalculated for this article. They nonetheless suggest the scale of a project that treated even the simplest desktop picture as a distinct creative work.

Giving artists and colors their own shelves

The website includes category galleries, a slideshow, links to individual contributors and a page of newly recycled icons. An illustrated map-icons gallery, dated in 1996, credits designers behind globe and country symbols rather than presenting every bitmap as anonymous clip art.

The FAQ addresses problems familiar to Windows 95 and 98 users: how to change file icons, how to show more than sixteen colors, which graphics programs can convert formats, and how to add a favicon to a website. It even discusses the Windows Registry, a reminder that customization sometimes required fiddling beneath the desktop's glossy surface.

A note from 2007 explains that the collection was once hosted on iconolog.net, a domain the original creator said no longer belonged to the project. The Gettysburg University address therefore serves as an archival home rather than evidence that the collection originated at a university.

The site's categories separate GIF and ICO versions because they were not interchangeable in practice. Modern operating systems hide much of this file-format and palette detail from users; on this website, it is still visible in the navigation.

The collection does not establish that every icon is free for commercial reuse. Artist credits, copyright information and format explanations are part of its preservation work.

Browse the icon archive and its period technical FAQ.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.