The Be icon style was desigend to reflect the modern "object oriented" BeOS and to be visually striking and "fun" because it was initially going to be marketed as a consumer oriented OS. Both the Mac and Windows OS style were a very "flat" 3D and not very colorful at the time that the BeOS was designed.

The Be icons became a very strong identifying brand element of the BeOS and the style has been widely immitated. The graphics and icons in the beOS were restricted to a fixed 8 bit (256) color palette with no transparency or anti-aliasing. The dark outline was necessary to ensure that the icons were readable on dark and light backgrounds.