Hacker News Reader

Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

One part is that the original OSX pinstripes-and-water Aqua and the brushed metal look that followed were extremely distinctive, and comparatively short-lived. That combination makes them inherently pinned to their period. The classic Mac OS design was comparatively blander[1], and changed more slowly.

[1] What was it with 90s and having medium-grey be dominating UI color? And everything having faux-3d bevels?

View on HN

> What was it with 90s and having medium-grey be dominating UI color? And everything having faux-3d bevels?

In the 90s, most large software companies (especially OS vendors) would run usability studies with real-world users at a variety of skill levels to try to make their software as easy to use as possible. Everyone used medium-gray as the main UI background color because it makes colored elements easily stand out, and doesn't affect an element's perceived color. Everything had faux-3D bevels because they make it obvious which elements are clickable, and which aren't.

I… don’t believe this. Reviews of the day were preoccupied with drooling over the graphics capabilities, given that it’s a mostly-objective thing to compare and were often the only visible thing that changed in an OS release. If you look at the embellishments that UI picked up they evolved in lockstep with the capabilities of the hardware. As soon as there was sufficient color depth for shadows, then shadows were added. Once that expanded to sufficient color depth for gradients, then gradients were added. Same with transparency. Once MS Windows got a GPU compositor in Vista we got “glass”.

It's the same thing as with lens flares or god rays in 3D games. There were phases where every game had completely overdone lens flares or god rays. Eventually the madness ends and designers are coming to their senses again (until the next madness starts).

Colours were pretty crap on CRTs. And greys were better on the eyes than dazzling whites. Even Netscape defaulted to grey.

I took fvwm and a very simple blue bar, trim and simple window buttons. And weirdly now it looks pretty modern and fresh.

Anyway there's always the bizarre windows fisherprice theme, and over used chrome gradients there to help you bring up some bile.

Even modern flat design has gone back to (subtle) 3D hints.

As for the medium-grey: I guess that had mostly to do with the properties of CRT displays.

...Sun, SGI, OS/2, AmigaOS 2.0 were all "grey desktops" with 3D bevels, Next was hardly standing out there.

AmigaOS 1.x had a blue background color, but this was mostly because home computers were used on cheap TVs at the time, where white-on-blue seems to have been the color combination that gave the least video artefacts and flickering.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com