A few weeks ago, we talked about a project within KDE to revive two of their classic themes, Oxygen and Air, and polish them up to make them usable on the current versions of KDE. The developers and designers working on this project say they’ve been utterly surprised by just how popular this news has proven to be, and Filip Fila published a blog post with some thoughts on this unexpected popularity. Why are people yearning so strongly for user interfaces from the past?
That’s the real story underneath the retro-yearning. It isn’t a simply story of people wanting their childhood from the 2000s back. It’s that a lot of ‘the new’ we’ve been offering doesn’t satisfy. It doesn’t have personality. It doesn’t feel warm. It doesn’t feel like it was made with the idea of being anything more than a clean product that gets the job done. The escapism towards the past is a symptom. A symptom of unmet needs, not mere sentimentality.
↫ Filip Fila
Fila uses modern architecture as an example, and I think it’s an apt one. While monumental modern architecture can easily be beautiful and striking, it’s the mundane buildings all around us that just don’t seem to elicit any positive emotions, no sense of belonging or safety. As Fila also notes, the decades-long swing to minimalism in both architecture and UI design isn’t merely because of a preference among designers, but also because minimalism is a hell of a lot cheaper to produce. A building with very little ornamentation and basic, straight lines is much easier, and thus cheaper, to design, construct, and maintain. The same applies to graphical user interface design.
There are some signs that the pendulum is starting to swing back towards more instead of less, in all aspects of design. More and more people are loudly demanding buildings to adopt more classical elements, and as we can all attest to here on OSNews, the longing for aspects of UI design from the ’90s and early 2000s to make a return is strong. And not just among us deep in the weeds, either; I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen normal people utterly confounded by modern UI design.
Anyway, bring back beveled edges.
If I can ever find time to finish my “Millennium Universal Native HIG” (It’s gonna take a while, because doing it properly requires digging back into things like the history of the Apple Lisa to be able to make authoritative citations to the user studies that showed that design decision X wasn’t just aesthetic), then one thing that will show up in that “Aesthetics-agnostic run-down of what we’d be seeing if the convergence of Windows 9x, classic Mac OS, GNOME 2, KDE, etc. had continued” document is an instruction on how to use raised and recessed stylings to indicate interactability.
(I can’t say more than that yet, because, while “buttons should be raised” and “text-entry fields should be recessed” is obvious, checkboxes and radio buttons have existed as either and I want to dig into what the actual intended rules were, rather than trying to reverse-engineer something like “Things which can take input focus should be recessed unless they are not stateful, in which case they should be raised”.)
…and yes, design elements like putting keyboard shortcuts in menus where they can be easily discovered first appear in the Apple-internal Lisa User Interface Standards document from 1980 and digging around on sites like folklore.org can find mention of replacing earlier designs with ones we now take for granted based on user testing.