Sandwich for British Library

A chronicle of visual styles and interface design.

It wasn't hard to determine that there were no remotely decent XP visual styles out there for an old-fashioned feel. They tend to follow the follies of video game interfaces—overdone with flashy, chunky orbs, overpowering wood textures, and obtuse metal ornaments. (There aren't that many of them.) In general, this is because there are three major veins of theme designers:

The chunky designers, who play to "this will make every 14-year-old script kiddie jump with joy," usually answering questions like "what if computers came in #00FF00?" or other novelty motifs for the kind of people who install spyware like candy, such as "what if computers came in Christmas?" (or, to make things worse, "what if computers came in #00FF00 and Christmas?") These people may or may not moonlight as discount Web 2.0 designers. Some of the tamer ones may be responsible for Luna.
The obsessive-compulsive minimalists, who reject the notion that their computers need a font larger than six points, which must either be a geometric sans serif or a raster font (especially a modular one), and believe that their UIs only need two or three colours—which are often rather close to each other. These ones confused me at first to such a degree that I thought they were original, until I realised that... every single Litestep theme fell under the same category.
Finally, the omg anything shiny is cool crowd, which, despite the title, will only tolerate shiny things if they are ports of Vista Aero to XP, hue-shifts of Vista Aero (ever seen a theme for Stardock's Impulse? Every one is just a recolour of the default Aero appearance!), or, of course, OS X. The closet Jobsophiles came first, obviously, but then so did their lord and saviour, so I guess they have that one. Humourously, however, Vistaphiles seem to be so predictably awful at remaining internally consistent¹ that they often mutilate their creations and we end up getting... chunkiness in the extreme. For some reason being a native speaker of Spanish or Portuguese doesn't seem to help. Be on the lookout for mixtures of Vista and OS X 10.3 – 4 that may cause internal bleeding. Of the retinas.

This leaves one rather remiss of anything resembling an actual design that is usable, although if you ignore the traffic-light context buttons, the Apple people sort of have it down. Their Microsoftian counterparts, however, just seem stuck on with a profound sense of arousal in glorifying misshapen and horrid buttons with bright frigging cyan glowing effects. (Except for the exit button, which is somehow even more terrifyingly like getting punched in the face.) Nowhere in the universe does anyone seem interested in designing an actual, functional interface that gets the job done, reminds one vaguely of an operating system, isn't too hard on the eyes, and is focused on usability rather than MovieOS standards certification or prostration in the eyes of steve. What happened to the beautiful people who designed Watercolor? KDE 2?² Even GNOME is kinda okay, once you get over how big everything apparently has to be.³ (Personally, though, I'm convinced that the designers of the BeOS icons went on to do Habbo Hotel.) All of these teams had huge amounts of flexibility at their disposal with the formats they were working in, but did they make giant stop signs? Did they undercut Fischer-Price's ability to expand into a new market? Did they shy away from using more than two palette entries?

The answer is—no. In fact, they showed restraint and sanity, often without any evidence of having done years of usability testing on their products. It doesn't take genius from above to know that window titlebars should be between 20 and 26 pixels in height, that people expect icons to be 16 by 16, that subtle gradients prevent the eyes from getting either bored or tired, and that silver or a mild tan is better than pure white. Or black. Or #00FF00. Knowledge of usability guidelines seems to be exceedingly hard to come by these days in the internet.

...

So, anyway, I looked at all of these things when delving into my plans to come up with a style that I felt would fit British Library. At first we used SlanXP (as indicated.) A minimal motif; the gradients on the buttons are too strong and the fonts are too small. But it's not the Hum-Vee of interfaces, nor is it Apple, or Vista, or Piet Mondrain.⁴ It looks like it had actual use in mind, perhaps on a 17-inch CRT at 1024x768 (which is not at all unreasonable.) It's likeable.

I settled for it for a while, but it didn't really espouse much of my aesthetics. I sat on the notion of a VS for a long time, until this came along. It's minimalism with gradients slapped on. The font is as unreasonable as possible—but the gradients are gentle enough that they are really quite pleasant. Too white, of course. Solution? Mod the crap out of it!

And this is what came out: the majority of the style isn't actually old-fashioned, except for the flourish hidden by Workspace Monitor in that screenshot. I gave it minimalist icons, and rejected the font as forcefully as I could, reverting to the same size and weight of Tahoma that Windows 2000 defaulted to. Eventually I sort of grew out of that and came up with a very nice italic Garamond, but I'm still working on tweaking it a little.

So no downloads for you yet! But remember traveller, always consider your intentions when working on a visual style. Your inventions may not be as likeable as you think they seem!

Footnotes

¹ Hey look, I found another Windows 3.1 icon in Windows 7!

² Keramik can go die in a fire.

³ Seriously, GTK, have you never heard of 72 DPI?

⁴ This man was evil.