Apple Desktop Interface vs Platinum
アップル・デスクトップ・インターフェース / プラチナ
The same Macintosh screen, sharing a menu bar along the top, rounded windows and gray parts.
How to tell them apart. Black and white only, with gray faked as a dot pattern, means the earlier style. Desaturated gray gradation and thicker window frames mean Platinum.
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.
Platinum
Apple's own name for the default appearance of Mac OS 8, shipped alongside the Appearance Manager, a framework built so the entire look could later be swapped for another. It drains the color out of the interface and works in grays alone, embossing whatever can be pressed and flattening whatever cannot until it merges with the background. The newly thickened window frame was a signal that the window could now be dragged by any edge.
| Apple Desktop Interface | Platinum | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1984–1997 | 1997–2001 |
| Family | Apple UI | Apple UI |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| 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 | Windows and controls built entirely from desaturated grays / Live controls carry a bevel and stand up, while disabled ones go flat and sink into the same gray as the background / Thick molded window frames sitting next to modal dialogs that have almost no frame at all / A collapse box at the right end of the title bar, and pop up menus raised into buttons with a double triangle |
| 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 | Rebuilding a late 1990s desktop screen with the period's actual control sizes and spacing intact · Showing which controls are usable in a dense business application without relying on color, using only whether a surface is raised or flat |
| 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. | One small sans serif carries both body text and controls. Hierarchy comes from surface height rather than type size, and bold is reserved for titles and the current selection. |
| 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. | Padding inside windows and dialogs is set in fixed pixel counts, and controls stack in a single column aligned to one left rule. Windows get the thick frame and modal dialogs get none. |
| 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. | Keep three grays (a light face, a base, a dark edge). Build the bevel from a one pixel light line at the top left and a one pixel dark line at the bottom right. For the disabled state, delete both lines and fill with the base gray. |
| 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. | Hand drawn custom controls do not participate in the system appearance, so they stay stuck in the previous generation's look while everything around them changes. |