Metro, a home away from chrome

Looking back, the geekiest thing ever was the introduction of the bevelled edge on a window. Just the merest hint of three-D and every morsel of geek DNA screams out for drop shadows to reinforce the ever present hint of morning sunshine that the window bevel shading suggests. Reading that stuff however is a pain and the use of bevels, drop shadows, halos and so on did nothing more than show off that one had a graphics card capable of colour gradation.

When reading, there is nothing more pleasing to the eye than the impression of a beautifully cut font. The simpler the font is to read, the better. The famous Swiss Font, Helvetica and its rip-offs, Verdana, Segoe et-al are icons of the dying years of the first electronic century. A time when designers ruled and were tasked with creating easy to read signage in busy metropolitan transport systems. Signage that was textually unambiguous and that was easy to understand by the droves of foreign tourists that passed through the great transport halls.

The Bauhaus design movement and the Swiss font sought to bring uniformity and simplicity to advertising so that the message became clearer and the nuance of that message relied not upon the typeface to imply class or style but to simply and firmly deliver the advertising slogan. The printed word became the vehicle upon which rode the fortunes of capitalism. Capitalism’s one true message delivered by capitalism’s one true typeface.

A hypertext document, web-page to the likes of you and me, has the possibility of being clean and simple to read but it requires elements of visual cues which tell the reader that the text is indeed a hyperlink. In the past, because we could, UI designers have reinforced the utility of onscreen controls by making them look like photorealistic representations of real things. Washing machines and other appliances sometimes had buttons moulded from clear plastic with the text pressed into the back of the button and painted or illuminated. We emulated that with gel-buttons.  We like to see buttons that sink down when we press them because that’s the way they work on our Hi-Fi systems or microwave ovens.

Can we express complex user interfaces in a clear and unambiguous manner without resorting to visual gimmickry? Can we return to the UI of GEM and the Apple Lisa while still retaining the ability to deal with situations far more complex than those systems ever dreamed of? In some way, I hope so. Maybe Metro can help with that.