# Amiga Workbench (アミガ・ワークベンチ)

> 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.

- IndexStyle No.518 — https://indexstyle.org/styles/amiga-workbench
- Kind: Style · Family: Platform Screen Languages · Era: 1985–1996
- Mood: Play, Technology, Nostalgia
- Color cues: #0055AA / #FF8800 / #FFFFFF (cues taken from reference works, not a fixed palette)

## Defining characteristics

- 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

## Composition recipe

- Typography & lettering: 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.
- Layout & structure: 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 & texture: 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.

## What to avoid

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.

## Application checklist

Before calling a piece an application of this style, check it against the defining characteristics:

- [ ] 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
- [ ] At least one reference work below has been studied directly
- [ ] The caution above ("What to avoid") has been addressed

## Related styles

- **Demoscene (デモシーン)** — The collective culture of programming art that compresses image and music into a few kilobytes of executable. Competitive real-time virtuosity under constraint became the training ground of the shader era. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/demoscene
- **Pixel Art (ピクセルアート)** — Treats the pixel as an honest unit, building clear form from limited resolution and palette. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/pixel-art

## Further study

- Amiga User Interface Style Guide のスクリーンとガジェットの章
- Release 2 で規定された、光源を左上に置く立体表現の作法
- Workbench の四色パレットが Amiga の表示ハードウェアの何に由来するか

## Reference works

- 《Amiga Workbench 1.x の画面》1985年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amiga%20Workbench%201.x.png
- The Maddestman《Workbench 1.2 のドロワー窓》2017年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Go-64!%20version%202.0%20floppy%20disk%20contents.png
- Chiffre01《Amiga Workbench 3.1 の画面》2018年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amiga%20Workbench%203.1%20screenshot.png

## Source of record

- Internet Archive — Commodore-Amiga, Inc., "Amiga User Interface Style Guide" (1991) — https://archive.org/details/amiga-user-interface-style-guide

## Machine surfaces

- JSON: https://indexstyle.org/api/styles/amiga-workbench
- Image-generation prompt (legally clean): https://indexstyle.org/styles/amiga-workbench/prompt.txt
- MCP: https://indexstyle.org/mcp (tools: search_styles, get_style, compose_styles; prompts: image-prompt, apply-style)