Issue is that modern UX designed moved away from this type of 3D buttons. There was a big transition from UIs using heavy skeuomorphism to a more flat and digital look.
To achieve hat you're showing you need some depth to the button. Hard to accomplish with today's design trends.
>> To achieve hat you're showing you need some depth to the button. Hard to accomplish with today's design trends.
This why some people complain about UI design "trends". They elevate an aesthetic choice over clarity, usability, or function (not sure which word is best here). Or in this case it seems part of the push was to reduce the screen space taken by a control.
It's things like this that make me think the way to make a good UI is to look at what modern UIs do and do the exact opposite.
1. No spacing.
2. Information-heavy cluttered screens.
3. No auto-save. You have to click the save button to save.
4. Colored icons. Colored interfaces. Not "tinted" a hue of black or white. Actual vibrant colors. And not just one color either! Two colors, at least.
Absolutely. I have a theory that "windows" are called "windows" because of the 3D ridges at the borders. The moment we stopped doing ridges, everything went the wrong direction.
This translucent, rounded, acrylic, material, whatever, it's just not fun. We had the technology for making glorious media players in the year 2000. Where did our technology go?
I'm on linux right now and I checked a bunch of desktop environments and every single one I checked the themes for (the theme browser sucks, by the way) what I see is dark theme with a blue tint, light theme with a blue tint, dark theme with a green tint, light theme with a green tint. A Windows 95, XP, and 7 clone. And that's it?
It just blows my mind. I don't know if it's because the theme browser sucks (the websites to browse the themes also suck, by the way), but I can not find one theme like XP but not XP. I'm left wondering where did all those people who made so many beautiful, glorious, amazing WinAmp themes go to. Did they become extinct? Are the theming APIs too limited today to go all out? Is the technology not there yet to have border-image in your windows borders?
This is just so depressing. I'm hoping the pendulum swings back in the next 10-20 years, and hopefully I'm still alive by then to see some cooler GUIs.
I remember modifying the UI of Virtual DJ 6 for friends that wanted their logo on it. It was all bitmaps. And I guess the different skins were 3D renders on existing DJ decks. But they were beautiful, although there was a period there were some issue when laptops were moving to a wider ratio.
Sounds kind of hard to use on mobile, which is indisputably a popular set of platforms.
No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Big (resizable) UI elements with poke-ability are fine. Auto-saving can be great depending on the application. Let’s just ditch the false simplicity and flatness.
Every single time I'm on desktop and I see a GUI that sucks, I know it's mobile's fault. Why this button so big? Mobile. Why spacing? Mobile. Why this list of 6 clickable items with one line of text each takes up my whole screen's vertical space? Mobile. Why no more status bars and tooltips? Because you can't hover on mobile. Why is the filter of this table below the table instead of above the table's headers? Because the thumbs won't reach the top on mobile. Why the headerbar buttons have no labels? Because they wouldn't fit in the horizontal space in mobile.
I'm really not a fan of mobile. If possible, I'd rather ignore it completely and just let mobile users rotate their screens.
To achieve hat you're showing you need some depth to the button. Hard to accomplish with today's design trends.