(Or: how we got into this mess and how to even begin finding our way out.)
Date: 2025-07-12
In the 32-Bit Cafe forum, yequari asks (on chat): "Why is so much effort spent on making forms not look like forms". As it happens, I wrote about this in a blog post from ten years ago that was supposed to be about games. It may be time for an update.
Look. On the one hand, the classic gray-on-gray look of GUI screens is off-putting. It looks bland and technical, much like being in a hospital, or a factory. All those strange machines, you know? No wonder people are scared of it.
It's likely also confusing. The same uniformity makes it hard to get your bearings. Since I mentioned it, look at any industrial control panel. How it uses grouping, shapes and colors to delimit various areas. You can still find that kind of functionality in some GUI toolkits like FLTK. I love FLTK, but it's not mainstream, and its looks are painfully dated.
Doesn't help that by default a regular text input field doesn't even have padding. This is equally true in HTML forms and Tcl/Tk for example: an artifact of the times when screens were tiny. It's also graphic design 101, but that's just it: I bet GUI designers didn't like talking to graphic designers back then, either, unless a Steve Jobs threatened to fire them.
Speaking of which: Remember how buttons looked on early Macs? They were flat rectangles with rounded corners and a thick fat border that made them Stand Out Big Time. Gee, I wonder why.
Around the same time, everyone else insisted on using highlights on a gray background to create a cheap 3D effect, out of a misguided drive to imitate real-life objects. On 16-color displays where unsubtle gray shades offered terrible contrast. At least modern GUIs use gradients. That helps. Too bad they still haven't figured out padding, despite screens being huge nowadays. The only design cue we seem to have taken from glossy magazines is thin light-gray-on-white text that seems intended to drive more business for eye doctors.
I don't have a recipe for fixing user interfaces on modern computers. It's not going to be simple. That said, there are some things worth trying:
- Different things should look different. Hint: human beings are wired to navigate a varied landscape using landmarks. Mazes are uniform. That's exactly how they work.
- Take a cue from games: they're not afraid to be whimsical, even garish. They stay easy to learn by keeping it simple, not by looking like every other game.
- Have some humility and talk to real people already. Never mind someone with special needs; modern GUIs don't even serve the vast majority.
No wonder so many people, even young people, are turning to command lines. You know, those dreaded technical computer-y thingies that are antithetical to the friendliness ideals a GUI promotes.
But as they used to say about Linux: it is a friendly operating system. It just chooses its friends well.
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