LESS.app Icon

LESS, the CSS preprocessor that extends CSS with things like variables, mixins, operations and nested rules, has a nice little OS X app for it called LESS.app. If you use LESS I strongly recommend you check it out as it uses the latest Less.js engine for its output, and Less.js is much faster and has more features than the older Ruby version.

Anyhow, the app uses the logo I designed for LESS as it’s icon, which doesn’t work very well on the OS X dock, so here’s my attempt at a better icon. The concept is quite tricky to portray in an icon since it’s very abstract. LESS itself is a stylesheet language, and LESS.app is a compiler for that language. So here I’ve got a blueprint to symbolize the stylesheet, and a cogwheel to symbolize some sort of mechanical process.

Here’s a zip file with a 512x512 PNG and an ICNS file. To install, right click on LESS.app, click “Show Package Contents”, open “Contents”, and then the “Resources” folder, drag the ICNS file in there to overwrite the old one. Back up (or just rename) the “less.icns” file if you’d like to have a copy of the original.

October 2010