It is, strictly going by looks, one of Microsoft's ugliest UIs. I will never understand how people tolerate it, let alone defend it publicly. Shameful, absolutely and thoroughly shameful!
It was the style at the time. There are a lot of programs from that era with stupid, oversized nothing standard ui's, windows xp was a study in restraint compared to many applications. I think computers had just gotten powerful enough to have large bitmaps in the ui and the designers got a little crazy with their newfound power, as they tend to do. Our "modern" superflat look is probably the remnants of a reflexive recoil at all that excess. I expect it will start rebounding the other way in a few years as up and coming designers get nostalgic for their windows xp youth.
Yes and no. XP’s default theme was hideous even at the time. The silver was fine as was the olive, but that blue was horrible.
It was a product of its time, though. This was also the time of media players that used entirely custom skinning and mostly looked terrible (at least in retrospect).
I hated XP's style at the time, too, and switched to the classic style. I also hated the look of Vista and 7, but they weren't my problem anymore because I'd switched to Linux.
The upside was that it was 100% customizable, there were tons of themes that redesigned the entire look of the desktop, and lots of resources for it.
Naturally, all mine looked like hot garbage, but it taught me about texture and image editing, and how transparencies worked in rendering (though xp themes were a special hell of using neon pink because transparent pixels werent usable yet)
It is, strictly going by looks, one of Microsoft's ugliest UIs. I will never understand how people tolerate it, let alone defend it publicly. Shameful, absolutely and thoroughly shameful!
It was the style at the time. There are a lot of programs from that era with stupid, oversized nothing standard ui's, windows xp was a study in restraint compared to many applications. I think computers had just gotten powerful enough to have large bitmaps in the ui and the designers got a little crazy with their newfound power, as they tend to do. Our "modern" superflat look is probably the remnants of a reflexive recoil at all that excess. I expect it will start rebounding the other way in a few years as up and coming designers get nostalgic for their windows xp youth.
Yes and no. XP’s default theme was hideous even at the time. The silver was fine as was the olive, but that blue was horrible.
It was a product of its time, though. This was also the time of media players that used entirely custom skinning and mostly looked terrible (at least in retrospect).
> I expect it will start rebounding the other way in a few years as up and coming designers get nostalgic for their windows xp youth.
cough Liquid Glass cough
I hated XP's style at the time, too, and switched to the classic style. I also hated the look of Vista and 7, but they weren't my problem anymore because I'd switched to Linux.
The upside was that it was 100% customizable, there were tons of themes that redesigned the entire look of the desktop, and lots of resources for it.
Naturally, all mine looked like hot garbage, but it taught me about texture and image editing, and how transparencies worked in rendering (though xp themes were a special hell of using neon pink because transparent pixels werent usable yet)
Was it significantly customizable out of the box? I remember installing WindowBlinds specifically so I could theme the OS.
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That is an entirely subjective statement. I think it looks great.
Of course it is. What would an aesthetic judgement be except subjective?
Dark theme, menu bar on the right side, icons only, auto hide. Out of site, out of mind.
Blue one was unbearable, but it looked pretty much okay with the gray theme.