December 17, 2005
Glass and Drop Shadows are the New Blue
I spent my day checking out Yahoo! Widgets, formerly Konfabulator, and I think it has been a pretty good experience so far. Although I've seen widgets or objects on the desktop before, the concept just never really stuck. Maybe it was the barrier of entry (price, $$$). Yahoo! is currently offering Widgets for free, so that helps tons.
Below is a picture of my desktop, the fruit of my labor... I selected some really useful widgets and sampled a whole other bunch. What I really like most about the whole widgets experience is the look and feel of the applications. Normally, I wouldn't ever use the phrase look and feel, because it's something that Java programmers throw around to bastardize native controls for application development, but that's something else...
These "mini-applications", as I've chosen to describe them, are very much in a different league than applications I've been using in the past... So far, there are Windows Applications, which adhere to The Microsoft Way and use native controls and have that crazy blue border that everyone hates (I dunno, I kinda like it, I'm sold), and then there are web apps. Welcome Ajax, etc etc. I know there's more than just those two types of apps, but those seem to be the most prominent types that differ from widgets.
Widgets simply don't have that nasty blue border around them. Nor are they confined to a rectangular area (well, I guess technically they are). But with tricks (graphical advancements I mean) like transparency and high-bit color depth, we get things like circles and triangles and glass and shadow... Which is the main point I'm trying to get at.
This whole glass and shadow look, I think, is the new blue. It's a mixture of what OS X first symbolized and what Windows Vista is trying to be. Sure, on the surface, it may look like excessive use of shading and transparency and processing power, but I think people are missing the main point. It's all about perception.
For instance, all of the icons on my Windows XP Start Menu have been updated to that new hi-res format, except for EditPlus. Now by pure virtue of aesthetic, I'd say that EditPlus is the worst application. Of course it's untrue, I love EditPlus dearly.
So aside from the obvious of how perception helps define the value of a product... Or at least the face value... Why? Why do things like highlights and gradients make anything better? I mean, I think they do. Like my secret to web design is excessive use of fades. My last project at IgoUgo that I did, excessive use of fades. The end result? People thought it looked pretty nice. Yeah right!
My theory is... Things in the real world are never, ever flat color. The real world is messy and organic and gradients are everywhere due to natural and ambient light. Even as I look to the walls in the room where I'm typing, I don't ever really see the color white. I see an off-white, I see darker shades in the shadows, I see highlights bouncing off the rim of my monitor... I see all these little things. And I believe if all these things are reflected in design, done tastefully, the end product is just... In a different league than anything two-dimensional.
And on to two dimensions... I read somewhere that CSS-heavy designs are, on the whole, accused of being very blocky, Well, I can see that. CSS out of the box supports really blocky, DIV-centric designs. But the main technical benefit of these blocky designs is that they are computer friendly. Easy to analyze, understand, and generate.
And so... Widgets help bring back a more chaotic, but tastefully organic element to design. We don't need to be blocky all the time. And widgets help us see that. A lot of widgets have that photo-realistic, organic feel to it, but are linked to live data feeds and change text dynamically. So we really can have our cake and eat it too, great looking designs and automatically generated content.
I think that's all I got for now. Glass and drop shadows are the new blue. Hell, the photo above this uses a drop shadow. Amen to that.
Posted by Mark Canlas at December 17, 2005 07:08 PM