Fix the Leopard Folders
All of the aforementioned usability issues serve to make it very difficult for users to differentiate between folders at a glance and the poor aesthetics prevent the folders from fitting in with the Mac OS X experience. It’s interesting because when designing there are often trade-offs made between aesthetics and usability. Either aesthetics improve at the expense of usability or there is an improvement in overall usability at the expense of aesthetics. In rare cases, with excellent designers and exceptional attention to detail, both dimensions can be very strong (e.g. iPhone UI). In the case of these folders however, there was a large decrease in both aesthetics and usability. There are not many upsides to this design as far as I can tell.
