Luna vs Platinum
ルナ / プラチナ
Luna comes from Microsoft UI and Platinum from Apple UI. 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.
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.
| Luna | Platinum | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 2001–2006 | 1997–2001 |
| Family | Microsoft UI | Apple UI |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | The blue taskbar / The green Start button / Rounded frames / Meadow-and-sky optimism | 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 | Using early 2000s PC culture as a device for nostalgia · Assembling a bright, friendly home facing screen through saturation | 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 | Bold sans in white, contrasted hard against the blue ground | 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 horizontal bar along the bottom, one primary control at its left | 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 | Saturated blue and green, frames swelled by rounding and gradient | 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 | Copying only the palette while dropping the rounding and swell leaves the colors floating, and none of the optimism arrives. | 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. |