(mac)OStalgia
To help me understand how modern applications would have looked liked in the Mac OS 9 era, I had to start analysing the OS in greater detail.
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I then started creating a Library of Mac OS 9 components that I reused throughout my project. The Mac OS 9: UI Kit is available to the whole Figma community. Feel free to use it for your own personal projects as well.
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Click through the slideshow to see the same applications in the macOS 11 environment followed by their Mac OS 9 treatment.
Via Rui Carmo:
I do miss the clarity and sparseness of this era of UI design, if only because windows and controls actually made efficient use of screen real estate instead of being 50% padding and cutesy spacing.
There are numerous details I’d quibble with (multiple windows active at the same time, for example), but it brought me joy to explore these designs and watch his video of them in action. I miss this style of UI design very much — not the exact look, per se, but the spirit of emphasizing clarity above all else, where content fields are clearly content fields, input focus is clear, and buttons look like buttons.
Previously:
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Great to get this as a Fifa kit. I might get to use it for some future wireframes.
Platinum will probably always be my favorite UI theme of all time, though I wish Espy Sans had played a bigger role.
I do miss the clarity and sparseness of this era of UI design, if only because windows and controls actually made efficient use of screen real estate instead of being 50% padding and cutesy spacing.
Yes. As an example, Windows’s redesign of their uninstall settings became far less space-efficient (each item takes up about thrice the space), less functional (there used to be functionality such as stacking items into groups), and less standardized (simply clicking a column header to sort no longer works; there’s now a separate drop-down to do that).
Apple Music’s “view as playlist” is very similar in that regard. Column headers exist, but you can’t click them. “View Options” offers nothing at all, when with “view as songs”, it contains many options, mostly additional columns to add.
I’m torn on whether the new look is more attractive, though. I do get these “it looks so 1990s’” criticisms from clients when using old-style table views, etc. To Apple Music’s credit, it does at least offer the option, although only in some areas, and only on the Mac (just because it’s hard to scale a UI paradigm down to a phone doesn’t mean they should not even attempt it), and who knows how long that will last at all. If I were a software engineer on the Music team, I’d probably be annoyed to have to maintain two code paths just because a minority of users wants to switch to the old style.
I’m not sure what the answer is. Is it to find a compromise in the middle (if so, I haven’t seen it)? Is it to go the Apple Music route and offer both user interfaces?
The new UI looks prettier, but every app now looks the same, which is odd since they do different things and form should follow function.
