One small but extremely annoying effect of Tech Modernization or w/e is how UI contrast is garbage anymore, especially just, like, application windows in general.
“Ooh our scrollbar expands when you mouse over it! Or does it? Only you can know by sitting there like an idiot for 3 seconds waiting for it to expand, only to move your cursor away just as it does so!” or Discord’s even more excellent “scrollbar is 2 shades off of the background color and is one (1) pixel wide” fuck OFF
I tried to move a system window around yesterday and had to click 3 times before I got the half of the upper bar that let me drag it. Why are there two separate bars with absolutely nothing to visually differentiate them on that.
“Well if you look closely-” I should not!! have to squint!!! at the screen for a minute straight to detect basic UI elements!! Not mention how ableist this shit is, and for what? ~✨Aesthetic✨~?
and then every website and app imitates this but in different ways so everything is consistently dogshit to try to use but not always in ways you can immediately grok it’s!!!! terrible!!!! just put lines on things again I’m begging you!!!!
I know I sound like a broken record when I praise Windows 95 UI, but holy fuck Microsoft figured this shit out already about 30 years ago. It’s all there, black and white, clear as christmas:
So much of modern UX woes stem from not knowing, or intentionally ignoring the genuine design study put forth into GUIs in the 90s.
3D elements are 3D in a specific way with lighting from a specific side to make it obvious where a window element begins and ends.
The gradient always should from from one side, and keep it consistent.
Make your color shading and shape of scroll bars consistently side and easy to press. I have a 4K display, don’t make me hunt for the magic activation pixel that makes your 3-pixel wide scroll bar appear.
It’s a desktop application, I’ve got the screen real estate to spare to have the actual GUI elements present on screen at all times (I know, heresy).
The moment aesthetic takes precedence over form and function, you’ve failed as a UI designer.
And any argument about “we don’t have the resolution” can go right out the window, we were having nice, clear and legible interface widgets on nine inch screens in 1984. We continued to have nice, clear and legible interfaces on machines vastly less powerful than today’s and on screens vastly less pixel-dense than today’s. We used to know what the hell we were doing. At least one of these examples even has on-screen instructions in case the widgets functionality isn’t immediately apparent.
since this has come back to my dashboard again i want to call attention to one more thing that these GUIs have that modern ones don’t even try to do.
RESIZE WIDGETS.
Do you tire of trying to grab and resize a window whose border is literally only 1 pixel wide?
Do you see how large the corner widgets are in those clips above? Those are at least 16x16 pixels. They’re almost as large as the Close buttons on a modern GUI. If you can see the bottom right corner of your window, resizing it is a snap. You can aim much more easily at a 16x16 widget than you can at a one-pixel-wide vertical line.
OK, maybe technically Windows’ borders are wider than 1 pixel. They’re technically 3 pixels. That is still just really goddamn tiny compared to 16 of them.
We used to be a society. Look at this. Look at this.
WINDOWS FUGGIN’ 95 HAD THE CORNER WIDGET. Why the hell can’t Windows 11?
tbh no april fools gag tumblr ever pulls will ever be as good as the lizard election of 2016 staff put more effort into that than the rest of this website combined and it shows
for those of you who werent here in 2016 on april fools that year the entire fucking website was transformed and there was an election for a position that wasnt even ever specified and the candidates were four lizards (or three lizards and a salamander as a scandal would later prove) and it was called decision2016
each lizard had their own 3d models and tumblr blog and campaign and there was also a tumblr blog dedicated to reporting on the election and they made like whole ass news broadcasts with a guy in front of a green screen
you could vote for your favorite candidate and there was a built-in function that let you make and post a campaign poster
in case anyone was wondering the winner of the election was mop. relatable and reliable. #Mop Could
lest we forget
This was absolutely the biggest April Fools effort I ever witnessed while on staff. I already posted about this in an ask but here’s more of the shit that went down behind the scenes.
- Like all April Fools, this was done entirely through volunteer work on Staff. No one was forced to work on April Fools, it’s always employee-initiated and driven, even if it needs approval from leadership.
- The prank almost didn’t go through because leadership felt that the lizards weren’t relatable enough, so the compromise was to give them hats.
- The video updates on the Decision 2016 blog were greenscreen Fiverr actors that were all recorded months? Weeks? in advance? I wasn’t on creative so I don’t know all the deets about how those were made.
- As mentioned in my post, the victory speech by Mop was one of our designers screaming as loud as she could in a closet near the end of the day. The full audio was never posted but staff kept passing around the scream on slack and laughing about it for months afterwards
- There was a “war room” dedicated to advancing the election narrative as votes came in, posting updates in real time and also pushing changes to code as necessary (for bug fixes and what not)
- The votes were real and the “election” was decided by real users, even if the graphics and whatnot were exaggerated for comical effect. Mop won because Mop won. Democracy at work
- Someone brought in their own lizard to celebrate the proceedings. It was a bearded dragon
- This was the culmination of what was probably the most cohesive and imaginative (and largest) creative team Tumblr ever had. Unfortunately almost all of them are now long gone, and Tumblr Creative is now just a skeleton crew compared to their peak
- Wretched Tooth Doesn’t Like To Talk About Himself
- People drew porn of the lizards and posted it on Tumblr. Staff saw it and were sending it to each other on the company Slack. We thought it was great. I mean, terrifying, but great
- This picture of David Karp is my favorite photo of David Karp I have on my phone
a whole chapter of my tumblr memoir will be “lizard election 2016”
it was the first project i ever led myself, and i thought i’d be fired for sure by the end of it. completely worth it. would do it all again.
my only regret, echoed by @zacksultan and a few of the other creatives, was that we didn’t get BuzzFeed and other press in the war room with us at the time. it was magical.
Btw much as I love to make fun of twitter and reddit’s business decisions, I have 0% trust in tumblr’s management to not go a similar route so this is your gentle reminder that you should regularly go to your blog settings to export your blog. That’s a fancy way of saying you can download a backup of your blog so if everything goes down you’ll still have a backup of your posts & convos.
It’s gonna come as a surprise to most of you, but if you don’t want to do that for whatever reason you’re allowed to not reblog this post. I’m not holding a gun to your head here I’m just trying to spread the word for people who do want a backup of their stuff.
Also, made this guide for backup Tumblr blogs (ft. export blog method, and python 3 script method):
imma say it. “kung fu panda” did more for body positivity and saying that you can be fat and still be healthy and liked than ANYTHING any beauty companies trying to get your money.
kfp also respects women more than any beauty company too.
also it had a positive relationship between an adopted child and his stepfather even after he found out he was adopted
Hey yknow how Viper was born without fangs, but instead of being rendered helpless as her family thought she’d be, she instead used her other skills to become the best warrior in her clan?
And how Tigress had severe, destructive anger issues when she was younger, but instead of being painted as a “problem child” she was instead taught her how to channel her emotions into something constructive?
And how Crane trained extra hard to impress a girl, and was by all rights the hero of his own story, but he still didn’t get her in the end? And how the girl isn’t shamed for it?
It’s almost as if you get more mileage out of treating your characters (and the people they resemble) with compassion than you do just shamelessly stamping them with your own misconceptions and hang ups.
[Image IDs: Image #1: Tumblr tags reading: #it also did more for proving you can have anthro girl characters without #making their character designs really horny! #tigress is a legend and i love her so much
Image #2: Tumblr tags reading: #plus tigress had no tiger boobs thank god #or viper #no sniddies /End IDs]
The whole central ethos of the franchise is that there’s no such thing as being The Best™ - there’s just being the best version of yourself you can be, and honoring/channeling your own strengths is the wise and badass thing to do.
ALT
