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Comment by Rinzler89 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, is it just me or does that screenshot of 2005 Krita 1.4 UI[1] look absolutely amazing?

All the icons are very distinctive and clear on what they do and the colors make them pop without stabbing your retinas. Perfect.

Feels like the mid-2000's was the peak in software UI design and it slowly started going downhill afte that, with companies chasing the soulless corporate mono-chromatic flat design inspired from mobile devices where you have no idea which UI element is a button you can hit and making you always hunt down buttons instead of instinctively nailing them every time with your peripheral vision because now all buttons are monochromatic and just bend together (look at your current browser's toolbar for example).

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Krita_1....

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The different icon colors and shapes help a lot. It doesn't look uniform, and this is actually a big plus, as there's less thinking required to identify the target. The new interface looks nicer, but interfaces should focus on being usable, not just look good. Sometimes this means getting out of the way and being unobtrusive. Other times, it means standing out more.

The modern Krita (which is not the final picture in the article) still does well. Most of the UI icons have clearly identifiable shapes, information density is even higher than in the old versions, and the style is still following the current fashion, with less color and a darker theme.

Agreed. I suspect the shift in design occurred when the base assumption moved from "most users have never used a computer before" to "most users are familiar with computers".

IMO Windows Interface Guidelines from 1995 are still relevant today: https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...

And since the new generation of users is growing up with mobile touch devices, we're coming back full circle to "most users never used a computer before".

To be honest, I still reference my paper copy of the Windows 1995 Interface Guidelines from time to time, when people propose new features for Krita. They are not always useful, but at least they don't change all the time.

Kudos for finding a screenshot on Wiki that hasn't been downsized to a postage stamp. For some reason they aggressively enforced a new policy a couple of years ago, and now many of the screenshots are tiny.

Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vchat.PNG

What a shame to lose useful illustrations of software history.

It says there the policy for shrinking down that screenshot is due to it being Microsoft copyrighted content. Probably for other copyrighted content as well. But Krita and other FOSS don't enforce this rule.

Seems a strange rule though, there are countless other websites hosting screenshots of copyrighted software. Surely it is well covered under fair use, if there needs be any legal basis.

IDK what Microsoft though, it could just be some trigger happy lawyers justifying their paychecks the same way Nintendo's do by aggressively defending any an all IP even if it's obsolete, since I doubt Microsoft and anyone there really cares that much about that V-Chat.

Krita at least can use any Qt theme installed on your system, so you can make it look like that (and actually i think even that specific theme is ported to Qt5).

I use a theme called "CDE-esque" that adds little bevels where appropriate. It isn't really CDE/Motif, if anything it is closer to Plastique (which i think is the theme in your linked shot) but it isn't overly flat either.

The icons are still monochrome but they look distinct enough for me to not bother me (and i tend to use the shortcut keys for most things anyway).

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