Welcome to the Icon Designer Webring!
Terry Godier wrote a beautiful essay "The Boring Internet". The internet isn't dying, he argues, just the commercial veneer glued on top of it is. Underneath all the engagement metrics and algorithmic feeds, there's still an older, slower, more federated web. One built on protocols nobody owns. RSS feeds still work (thank you, Aaron), people can set up websites and blogs.
Lets start a webring in 2026
Don't worry, I haven't pushed too many pixels and gone a little cuckoo. But it's a fun exercise to remind what the web once was. We'll silently skip over the fact that I actually started using gopher first, but even web surfing didn't begin on a search engine back in the day. It was web rings, later followed by index sites.
Start
Not long ago I posted about designing app icons for 3rd party GNOME app developers. The post generated quite some buzz and some old and new faces started showing up to help with the backlog. So obviously I'd like to take you on a webring tour of all the designers responsible for making the GNOME app ecosystem a little less awkward to browse on Flathub.
Let me introduce you to Brage. He's been around for a couple of years now, helping to tame the flames of the reddit community, helping with the GNOME Circle project to improve the quality of GNOME apps in the wild, creating illustrations for initial states in apps, authoring some noteworthy apps himself. So thank you, Brage, welcome to the 90s!