Comment by somat
5 days ago
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