Apple Desktop Interface vs Pixel Art
アップル・デスクトップ・インターフェース / ピクセルアート
Apple Desktop Interface comes from Apple UI and Pixel Art from Digital Image Techniques. One is style and the other technique. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Apple Desktop Interface
This is the design language Apple named itself, in the 1987 guidelines book whose subtitle reads The Apple Desktop Interface. Working with one bit of black and white, it wrote down a house style: halftone dot patterns standing in for gray, rounded window corners, a title bar of stacked horizontal rules, and a heavy bitmap face.
Pixel Art
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Treats the pixel as an honest unit, building clear form from limited resolution and palette.
| Apple Desktop Interface | Pixel Art | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1984–1997 | 1970s– |
| Family | Apple UI | Digital Image Techniques |
| Kind | Style | Technique |
| Cues | Two tones only, black and white, with gray faked by a checkerboard of black dots / Window corners are rounded and the title bar carries several thin horizontal rules / A menu bar pinned to the top edge of the screen, the Apple mark sitting at its left end / Chicago, a heavy bitmap face whose letters are packed into a cell of 9 by 7 dots | Visible pixels / Limited palettes / Tiles / Sprites |
| Best used for | Redrawing early Macintosh screens for an exhibition panel or an article on a modern display · Designing for a device that can only print or light two tones, such as e paper or a receipt printer | Icons and controls for small screens that stay clean when scaled up · Game characters and terrain that must read apart at tiny sizes |
| Type | A heavy bitmap sans, letters placed only on whole pixel positions, no anti aliasing; headings differ from body text by size rather than weight. | Draw letters on the same grid, fixing cap height in pixels |
| Composition | A full width menu bar owns the top edge and everything below it is the work surface; rounded rectangular windows overlap freely and margins step in whole pixels. | Scale only by whole multiples and keep every element on grid |
| Material | Black and white alone; middle values come from checkerboard or diagonal dot patterns, soft shadows and gradients are out, and every boundary is a one pixel black rule. | Limited palette, dark outlines, neighboring hues to soften the steps |
| Caution | Scaling the bitmap face by anything other than a whole number, or letting it anti alias, blurs the letterforms and erases the placed-by-hand dot density the style lives on. | Downscaling a photograph skips the decision behind every single pixel, and the contours turn muddy the moment the image is enlarged. |