Luna vs Motif
ルナ / モチーフ
Luna comes from Microsoft UI and Motif from Platform Screen Languages. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Luna
Windows XP's look: blue taskbar, green Start button, rounded windows and a meadow wallpaper repainting the gray office machine as household optimism.
Motif
Motif is the interface language of UNIX workstations, maintained by The Open Group, standardized as IEEE 1295 and shipped on more than two hundred platforms. Its own data sheet calls the look a distinctive 3D beveled appearance, meaning every part sits on a gray face edged with one light line and one dark line.
| Luna | Motif | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 2001–2006 | 1989– |
| Family | Microsoft UI | Platform Screen Languages |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | The blue taskbar / The green Start button / Rounded frames / Meadow-and-sky optimism | A gray face lit along its top and left edges and darkened along its bottom and right, so every part appears raised / While a control is held down the two edge colors swap and the part sinks / A thin rectangular ring is drawn around whichever control currently takes keyboard input / Scroll bars are square cornered rectangles with a triangular arrow button at each end |
| Best used for | Using early 2000s PC culture as a device for nostalgia · Assembling a bright, friendly home facing screen through saturation | Rebuilding a UNIX workstation era application for an exhibit or a technical write up · Building instrument or CAD controls where pressable and unpressable must read as relief rather than color |
| Type | Bold sans in white, contrasted hard against the blue ground | A small sans at one fixed size, labels held to a single line, no letterspacing and no ornament inside the text. |
| Composition | A horizontal bar along the bottom, one primary control at its left | Windows are cut into beveled rectangles and controls are packed a few pixels apart; there is almost no breathing room, the screen is filled with operable parts. |
| Material | Saturated blue and green, frames swelled by rounding and gradient | Pick one face color, derive a light edge and a dark edge from it, and paint them on opposite sides; swap the two while pressed, and never round a corner. |
| Caution | Copying only the palette while dropping the rounding and swell leaves the colors floating, and none of the optimism arrives. | Replacing the two hard edge colors with a soft drop shadow kills the flip that signals a press, leaving decoration that merely looks raised. |