Iconography of the PuTTY tools

Ah, PuTTY. Good old reliable PuTTY. This little tool is one of those cornerstone applications in the toolbox of most of us, without any fuss, without any upsells or anti-user nonsense – it just does its job, and it has been doing its job for 30 years. Have you ever wondered, though, where PuTTY’s icons come from, how they were made, and how they evolved over time?

PuTTY’s icon designs date from the late 1990s and early 2000s. They’ve never had a major stylistic redesign, but over the years, the icons have had to be re-rendered under various constraints, which made for a technical challenge as well.
↫ Simon Tatham

The icons have basically not changed since the late ’90s, and I think that’s incredibly fitting for the kind of tool PuTTY is. It turns out people actually offer to redesign all the icons in a modern style, but that’s not going to happen.

People sometimes object to the entire 1990s styling, and volunteer to design us a complete set of replacements in a different style. We’ve never liked any of them enough to adopt them. I think that’s probably because the 1990s styling is part of what makes PuTTY what it is – “reassuringly old-fashioned”. I don’t know if there’s any major redesign that we’d really be on board with.
↫ Simon Tatham

Amen.