Amiga Workbench

アミガ・ワークベンチ / 1985–1996 / Style / Platform Screen Languages

The screen language Commodore set down for the Amiga in its own style guide. Early Workbench works in four colors, blue with white and orange, and packs Topaz, a blocky bitmap face, into a 640 by 200 grid. Its signature move is that the screen itself is a layer, so grabbing the bar at the top and dragging it down reveals another screen running behind it with its own palette and resolution.

Amiga Workbench — Amiga Workbench 1.x screen, 1985 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
Amiga Workbench 1.x screen, 1985 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Amiga Workbench — The Maddestman, Workbench 1.2 drawer window, 2017 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
The Maddestman, Workbench 1.2 drawer window, 2017 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Amiga Workbench — Chiffre01, Amiga Workbench 3.1 screen, 2018 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
Chiffre01, Amiga Workbench 3.1 screen, 2018 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0

At a glance

Visual cues

  • A screen that uses four colors and no more, which are blue, white, orange and black
  • A blocky bitmap face packed into a coarse 640 by 200 grid
  • A full width title bar running across the top of the screen, with depth gadgets at its right end
  • Live controls raised by a light line at the top left and a dark line at the bottom right, inverting to a sunken state when pressed

Best used for

  • Rebuilding a 1980s home computer screen as the third lineage, neither Macintosh nor Windows
  • Working under a four color limit where press and disabled states have to be carried by inverted light and dark rather than by hue

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Dictionary entry

Type
Set a monospaced bitmap face at its native size with no scaling and no smoothing. Fix the cap height around eight pixels and keep the leading tight.
Composition
One full width title bar runs across the top of the screen and windows fill the space below. Windows may overlap freely, but screens never do, since they slide vertically as whole layers.
Material
Fix the four color set before anything else. Build depth from a one pixel light line and a one pixel dark line rather than a gradient, keep the light source at the top left, and swap the two lines for the pressed state.
Caution
Adding colors past the four breaks the very mechanism that carried press and disabled states, because those were read as contrast in brightness, and the controls become indistinguishable on a monochrome or grayscale display.
Further study
the screens and gadgets chapters of the Amiga User Interface Style Guide / the rule set in Release 2 placing the light source at the upper left for three dimensional rendering / what in the Amiga display hardware the four colour Workbench palette derives from

Related entries

More from Platform Screen Languages

Continue through styles in the same Platform Screen Languages family, prioritised by shared effects.

Browse all Platform Screen Languages entries

Cite this entry

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https://indexstyle.org/styles/amiga-workbench
Markdown
[Amiga Workbench — IndexStyle](https://indexstyle.org/styles/amiga-workbench)
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<a href="https://indexstyle.org/styles/amiga-workbench">Amiga Workbench — IndexStyle</a>

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