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dheera

UIs go through 3D and 2D in phases.

Windows 2.0 - 3.1: 2D

Windows 95 - 7: 3D

Windows 8 - 10: 2D

MacOS 6 - 7: 2D

MacOS 8 - 10: 3D

MacOS 11: 2D

As a side point, I predict Sheriff and Sans-Sheriff fonts to also go into similar phases too though over a longer time scale. We're in a very long Sans-Sheriff phase now but I think Sheriff will be "in" in 20 years.

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FWIW, Macintosh System 6 was just black and white (and only 640x480px), so 3D wasn't really tenable.

System 7 and 8 had support for color, and was as 3D as it could muster, like highlight and shadow treatment on buttons and other widgets, and embossed, draggable thumbs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#/media/File:Mac_OS_7....

Mac OS X brought Aqua, which was a pinnacle of 3D and skeuomorphic design. You know you're going hard for 3D when you add a drop shadow on all the text in your menubar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0#/media/File:MacO...

(and that IE logo in the dock wasn't there as a joke: it really was the best browser for OS X until Safari was a thing, years later)

512×342 actually, at least for the compact macs with the built in screen.

Those pinstripes.

Recently I’ve been enjoying serif fonts in more places than I used to, because I instructed Firefox not to allow sites to override my font choices (so I get exclusively Equity for serif, Concourse for sans-serif and Triplicate for monospace), which is quite pleasant and relaxing in general (Google’s foolish/poorly-implemented ligature-based icon font technique is the only notable breakage/uglification I’ve found in the couple of weeks I’ve been doing this), but apparently it’s more common than I realised for people to omit the fallback “sans-serif” or “serif” or “monospace” that they should always have on their font-family stacks, and my fallback default is serif. (e.g. I’m just now looking at a `font-family: 'Lato','Helvetica','Arial';`, and yesterday examined a `font-family: some-web-font, Open Sans;`.)

> Equity for serif, Concourse for sans-serif and Triplicate for monospace

Are you a lawyer? (There is an in-joke here, I swear)

No, but Matthew Butterick, who made them, is: https://mbtype.com/, https://mbtype.com/bio.html.

Yes, that was the in-joke. :) They're among my favorite typefaces (as is his newer Century Supra).

Sheriff? I think you mean serif, partner.

Deputy. Perfect name for a new Sans-Sheriff typeface.

…there's a new serif in town.

I think Ken Shirriff would have something to say about this.

http://www.righto.com/

I'm assuming they are a victim of autocorrect, pilgrim.

In some languages (e.g., Polish), the word for "serif" is the same as the one for "sheriff".

Windows 3.0/3.1 buttons are quite 3D, perhaps you meant the flat Windows 2.0 buttons? http://toastytech.com/guis/win31.html https://www.howtogeek.com/674574/windows-3.0-is-30-years-old...

Raymond Chen commented on the fashion cycle back when Office XP started drifting in the flat direction[1].

[1] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20040728_291_...

Mac OS X has been in a Sans-Sheriff phase since Steve Jobs died

Is macOS 11 a lot different than macOS 12?

I'm using macOS 12 right now and there are a lot of 3D elements especially if you compare it to Windows 10 or Gnome in the screenshots of this post. It seems to be a mix of both approaches (similar to GTK 3).

It's not very different. I don't know if "flat" was ever the right word to describe the look it started moving toward post-Aqua; I think I'd be more inclined to call it "minimal", occasionally to a fault. With a few exceptions (most notably the bonkers choice to make all keyboard shortcuts gray in menus so at first glance they all look disabled), though, I mostly like the look that Big Sur's ushered in.

The Serif Sheriff wants you in jail if you use Serif these days

You sansed the serif? What about the DPI-t?

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