As I mentioned recently, ripping-off graphical user interface designs is common practice, and harks back to the beginning of the Mac OS / Windows « competition ».
More recently (although it was actually five years ago!), when Apple released Mac OS X with its « Aqua » interface, translucent, glassy/watery widgets started popping up all over the web.
Last year, when Apple released Mac OS X 4.0 a.k.a. « Tiger », it introduced two new snazzy graphical effects:
1/ The « mirror effect », first introduced in the iChat videoconferencing program I believe, in which images on screen have an upside down reflection, implicitly suggesting that they are « propped-up » on a shiny stage:
2/ Shiny, « plasticky » buttons and widgets:
I personally quite like these two effects. And I am certainly not alone. For instance, take a look at these two pictures taken from the upcoming Microsoft Windows Vista & Microsoft Word 12. Microsoft seems to like glassy and plasticky too:
These two effects are also used all over the web, especially on so-called Web 2.0 sites, such as last.fm.
In fact, the « sknoblog » logo at the top of this post was created by the Web 2.0 Logo Creator online application! Type in your text and get a shiny, plasticky logo, with or without reflexion.
If you keep an eye out for them, you’ll see them everywhere…
That last one is a Google widget by the way.
Now I know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and there are fashion trends in graphical design like everywhere else, but I just have to wonder: With so many web sites and software companies out there, shouldn’t we be seeing a variety of interesting, trend-setting designs? I suspect that the fact that we aren’t has more to do with expediency and laziness than with flattery or anything else.
In fact, I’ve been thinking about this again lately because I’ve been translating a large (Windows) application with a GUI which looks just like Apple’s Dashboard Widgets etc, (dark colors and black, shiny plastic buttons everywhere).
And then this morning I stumbled upon a screenshot of an upcoming Sony PS3 online service:
Not only does it have the obligatory reflection (see the bottom of the image), but even the color scheme reminds me of Apple’s QuickTime web page (and of some iTunes Store pages, and of the iTunes 7 application color-scheme). So now, after Web 2.0 sites everywhere, Microsoft, other Windows application developers, Sony pulls up a seat to the shiny plastic table.
Maybe this is just another manifestation of my personal taste for the unexpected, but it just annoys and disheartens me that so little effort goes into design in general, and that the efforts of one company (Apple, as usual) are just lazily pillaged, ad nauseam.