Not feeling the 2003 current look and feel of Mac OS X, also known as 10.3 or Panther, I stumbled upon a piece of software engineered to allow you to change the look and feel of the OS experience. The now discontinued piece of software Shapeshifter enabled you to apply pre made themes through a preferences pane.

After some exploration on what could be done with the software, I decided to create my own theme with one simple goal in mind - to remove all resemblance to real life textures, or skeuomorphic design from the visual experience.

The design work resulted in a simple greyed out, flat version of Mac OS X. I wanted to have a distraction free operating system where my daily design work accidentally wouldn't be affected by traces of brushed metal, embossed traffic lights or skeuomorphic plastic stripes. I did, however, decide to keep the original intent of the interaction and therefor did not change anything in regards to sizing, shape or placement of the original components.

This was years before before Apple themselves decided to walk down the same path with Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite.

Not long after the release, I came in contact with French icon designer Laurent Baumann. After some conversation, and after Shapeshifter added the feature to change system icons through the preference pane, we decided to bundle the theme and icons as a package.

With software updates putting more and more emphasis on system security, making it difficult to access low level code for visual alteration, the Shapeshifter project was sadly put to rest with Mac OS X 10.5. A couple of attempts was made to keep the theming community alive, but for me, the journey came to an end.

But it sure was fun while it lasted.