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S O F T W A R E MacPaint The Original Painting Program on the Macintosh Written by Bill Aitkenson, MacPaint was the first painting program for the Macintosh. It was bundled with all the Original 128K macintoshes. This program sat the standard for all the graphics programs thereafter. MacPaint is a one bit, black and white bitmap painting program which only handles graphics at a resolution of 72 dots per inch, the same as the screen resolution of Vintage Macs. Of course MacPaint is no Photoshop, but I really like its simplicity - there is no layers, transparency, no colours, no channels - what you see is exactly what you get. The dithering, bitmapped quality that MacPaint produces is very unique and characteristic. I was reading a back issue of Emigre Magazine from 1989 (Emigre is a typography magazine) last week. It was about the Macintosh and the design industry. A lot of designers at that time felt limited by the low resolution of MacPaint graphics, and some of them thought that if designers use the Macintosh, every designers' work would be the same. Some thought that bitmapped graphics looked ugly, and they wished they could have high resolution on the Mac. Others thought MacPaint graphics could be explored more to make it a unique style. It seems now that we've taken high resolution graphics for granted, it's time for the revival of low resolution bitmapped graphics again! Nearly all the graphics I've used in this site are imitated MacPaint graphics I created in Photoshop. I'm really bored with the typical drop-shadowed, bevelled, full colour graphics on the web. There's not much personality in them. Most designers do these things because every one else is doing it. You can create MacPaint-like images by converting a high contrast grayscale image into bitmap mode in Photoshop using the diffusion option.