According to a story at the Microsofty news site ActiveWin, frog design (don’t you hate companies who’s names are all lower-case?) was involved in the design of Microsoft’s new Windows Media Player look and the new Windows XP flag logo.
I also discovered recently that icon design gurus IconFactory designed the new Windows XP icons. 
They are very pretty (although, as I’ve said before, simply maaaaan). This crew also made a nice transition from the pixel-perfect to the new big-ass smooth Mac OS X icons for Audion (also see their gallery of other OS X icons – some of the nicest I’ve seen – be sure and check out all of the ‘client samples’).
frog has long been a not-so secret weapon of Steve Jobs, having worked on a slew of early Apple and Macintosh products as well as the infamous NeXT (more company capitalization) machines.
I remember years ago walking in to a local computer store with my good friend Dan and the cheque from our small business loan in hand. We needed two high-end desktops – which at the time meant Pentium 200’s with MMX with 32MB of RAM. As soon as we saw them, we knew which ones we had to have. 
A beautiful sleek black minitower with matching mouse, keyboard, and monitor. They were Acer Aspires, but we later found out they were one of the PC world’s earliest non-beige boxes and they were designed by frog. I still have the matching phone at my appartment.
I also remember being amazed and confused by the wonderful inclusion of the Buddy Holly video by Weezer on the Window 95 CDROM.
I saw this on a Slashdot comment, it was cute:
I wonder was OSX means then.
What does XP stand for? Don’t you remember the clippy ads? It stands for ‘eX-Paperclip’.
I am smart.
Vince, you are smart indeed.
XP apparently stands for eXPerience. This is odd and lame, but not surprising, and the NT in Windows NT was supposed to have stood for New Technology.
Microsoft, what is up with the random acronyms?
And cut clippy some slack, he was involved in what I think is one of my favourite aov graphics ever.
I think my favorite new icon so far is the nice transparent recycle bin…try dragging it over stuff, you can see through it!
Aside from the icon licking, I wonder what the business prospects for XP are? If PC sales forecasts are awful due to market saturation and a general recession and no one really needs to upgrade to this thing – by MS’s own admission – what will be done with this thing? I found the nightmarish “man behind desk out of control” ads poorly thought out – perhaps you have to be a guy behind a desk with a tie many days to get the willies from it.
Frog is tearing up the pipette industry with totally extreme designs.
Alan,
Most of the reviews I have read recommend upgrading to XP if you aren’t already at Win2k, and I am inclined to agree. XP is running much faster on my machine than 98SE did and no crashes! It’s a harder sell for Win2k’ers unless they need the new multimedia touches, but for 95/98’ers I think it’s a must have.
Steve, I have to agree with you on the “favourite aov graphics ever” comment.
When I saw that, I laughed until I cried, then saved it as my wallpaper. Keep up the great work.
Thanks Charlie – I don’t know if I would feel like I was in a MS world without random crashes on a regular basis. I will probably get a shot at XP when the office upgrades sometime after Christmas.
Good article article The Register that compares XP to Redhat7.2 and likes neither. This sums it all up:
“If these OS’s were cars, XP would be the Warner Brothers Special Edition minivan, and 7.2 would be a Yugo well on its way to becoming a KIA.”