Does the icon for Apple’s Preview application give you the willies like it does me?

Even at the icon’s largest, the kid looks like he’s done that trick where his eyelids are folded up on themselves and now he’s wandering around the beach, his hands together in prayer, urging the demons who live in the sea behind him to come forth.

Like so many of the regrettable things spawned by the 80s,  goths  are best remembered for their influence on aesthetic tastes outside their own subcultural boundaries (I’m ignoring for the sake of argument their best contribution, which is in the domain of music).

Today, I put together a set of icons to counter the gratuitous use of “aqua” in the default OS X icon set. One of these icons interprets Preview’s truly frightening inside-out eyelid boy icon in a manner influenced by mid-80s techno-gothic.

It also memorializes the passing of postmodernity by offering users a sprig of irony. A jot of irony. Something. I’ve named the resulting collection  squidGothic .

Happy New Year!