~Project Orihime: buttons and system font~
Project Orihime is a concept of a modern user interface for EGA and VGA displays running in 16 colours, aimed primarily at FreeGEOS.
The goal here is to bring an eye-candy interface and good UX to the 1984 IBM PC clones.
This is not a real UI (yet), but it gets more and more fleshed out, and I think it looks great on both CRTs and LCDs of the era.
I want to try and document some of my progress for your enjoyment. It also helps me to make better sense of design decisions I am taking on the go. Thread!
1/10
For those of you who never thought about old computers and modern interfaces, I want to remind you that "simple" and "flat" interfaces of modern operating systems rely on high resolutions and 24-bit colours a lot.
Take Gnome 46, for example.
1920x1080 in VGA palette looks somewhat okay, but
640x480 in modern 24-bit colour looks like it's losing quite a lot of details, and
640x480x4bpp VGA 16 of the said interface is simply unusable. Perhaps this is why modern OSes demand at least 800x600 in True colour.
So, uh, do you know what you usually end up when you try to make your interfaces look OK in default palette and resolutions of 640x350 or 640x480?
2/10
At best, you end up with things that look a lot like Windows 95. This is FreeGEOS, which I am aiming my UI/UX upgrade for, but you could take any OS that officially supports 640x480 in 16 colours, and it will look more or less like that.
The palette is very limited, and if you try to add custom drop shadows with dithering, you run out of resolution very quickly.
That means eye-candy and smooth corners can only take a few pixels at best. In the previous thread, I've explored my approach to making Windows and Titlebars, and this time I want to show you how I took a stab at making the next UI staple - The Button.
Previous thread btw: https://tech.lgbt/@nina_kali_nina/112518604838598161
3/10
I took my default window as a canvas (note yellow-white window background, it is quite unusual for OSes of the era, but not unthinkable, and it looks kind of nice on a CRT), and made a bunch of buttons.
It quickly becomes obvious that:
1) Gradients don't work, take too much space
2) Motif-like buttons work, but look dated
3) Coloured buttons don't work
4) Monochrome buttons look meh
5) Overly-round buttons look meh
4/10
I chose two designs I liked the most, dark and light, and tried to invent variations of the buttons for Inactive-Selected-Hover modes of the button.
This was the moment I realised why Windows 95 required a VGA monitor, and why Mac Classic and Windows 1/2/3 interface font was so bold. Mac Classic and Windows 1/2 were supposed to work fine in monochrome.
Curiously, Windows 3.1, which dropped official CGA/monochrome support, sometimes "loses" UI elements on monochrome displays.
5/10
After trying out different button designs on a real display, I decided that I like dark button better, but I need a better design for "inactive" buttons.
Especially considering how fonts are super important on low resolutions, and how much I don't want to make UI font to be bold by default just to make text on inactive buttons readable.
6/10
With dark buttons comes an unexpected change to the interface palette.
Dark buttons don't look great with light title bars. So the title bar has to be dark grey. And if the title bar is dark grey, then default bright-yellow window colour is too contrast and unpleasant.
So, here we go: dark window titles, dark buttons. Kind of nice, I think?
7/10
@nina_kali_nina Hm, can you remove the outline on the text in the title bar?
Or make it thinner?
@andre
Removing the outline makes the title visually less important. Make it "thinner" is hard because it is already one pixel wide.
If I make it less "black", then I have to use the same colour as the title bar itself. Anything even more lighter, and it becomes a "highlight", not the kind of the effect I want here.
But adding a colour accent, like muddy cyan, might actually work here. What do you think?
@nina_kali_nina Hm, I would use that one if the window grabs attention.
Looking at the menu bar at the very top also shows good contrast (not measured, judging from a look at it) while being clearly discernible.
The inactive calculator has a distinct title, too.
I'm not a typographist but I felt like the outline hurt readability (it was too thick compared to the flesh of the character). Now I've read the thread and new about the constraints you operate in here. One font had two 2px wide outline but I wasn't sure whether it was used in the title.
So if you can't remove it, can you desaturate it? The black is too dominant here.
@andre also,
> Now I've read the thread and new about the constraints you operate in here.
Does it mean that the screenshot does not look like something that could run on a computer from 1984? If yes, I have succeeded at my goal at least a bit :D
@nina_kali_nina Um, I was born five years later 
@andre I'm so glad you avoided many painful computer interactions! :D
@nina_kali_nina Memories set in around that time.
So I remember EGA / VGA times, I think. Not sure about CGA.
Defo not monochrome. Colours were invented at my time.
@andre yeah, this is similar to the class of hardware I'm trying to use! I have a few mock ups that would work on CGA card that is used in your screenshot