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very little guidance for aesthetic design was
offered. Borland devoted a half-page to the aesthetic considerations
of icon creation. The printed documentation for the Borland SDK weighs
about fifteen pounds! ``Icons in Everyday Life,'' a paper by William
and Susan Wood, notes that even when specific graphic role-models are
provided, today's developers disregard the carefully considered
guidelines in favor of their own. The Macintosh interface guidelines
offer artists some simple `meta-icons,' on which to base their own
designs. Although some designers have adhered to the framework, many
more have strayed. Here is the table presented by the
Woods:[20]
Other aesthetic considerations for each operating environment were
also omitted from their respective documentation--and this made
something clear. When designing the visual interface for a software
application in an operating system or environment, the designer is
restricted by the standard graphic elements of that system.
While custom code could probably be written to support almost any
visual feature, it is much quicker to simply `settle for' the graphic
elements or `widgets' already provided by the SDK author.
The lack of aesthetic guidance for software development was evident during a fun exercise in which our HCI class visited a Macintosh computer lab and played with shareware software. In the course of an hour, we sampled dozens of home made and semi-professional software creations. While those `constant' graphical elements of the operating system were usually visible in each design--scroll bars, menu bars, title bars, etc.; other interface elements were all over the map. Some icons were way out of proportion with the others--as though they had been stolen from their X-Windows siblings. Other applications had elements on the screen that were drawn in shaded 3-D perspective with the imagined light source coming from the upper left, while others put the imagined light source elsewhere (like from the bottom right!). To really see things pop on your eyes, try running two applications like that side by side and staring at them for a few minutes. Other amusing aesthetic designs included self-defeating foreground text-background color combinations that were unreadable, and `illustrated' adventure games with animated illustrations that ranged from `interesting' to downright ugly. Visual artists everywhere should perform some community service by hooking up with a local shareware author and helping them rethink their GUI's.
