# Xerox Star Interface (ゼロックス・スター・インターフェース)

> The screen language set by the Xerox 8010 of 1981. Labelled iconographic symbols stood for folders, in and out baskets, file drawers and other office accessories, which the brochure of that year said amounted to an electronic desk top. Objects on the screen could be moved, copied and deleted with the hand held pointer that the same brochure still had to gloss as a mouse.

- IndexStyle No.532 — https://indexstyle.org/styles/xerox-star-interface
- Kind: Style · Family: Platform Screen Languages · Era: 1981–1990s
- Mood: Technique, Trust, Futurity
- What this family collects: Design languages written down for a platform and published, from the vendors that shipped an operating system to the governments that had no reason to hide rules paid for with public money, every one of them recognisable at a glance.

## Defining characteristics

- Every symbol on screen carries a text label, so meaning never rests on the picture alone
- The symbols stand for things found on an office desk: folders, in and out baskets, file drawers
- Objects are grabbed with the pointer, and moving, copying and deleting form one family of gestures
- The spreadsheet appears as a grid of rows and columns, with a menu of tools that act on the matrix

## Best used for

- Laying out a business application around objects a user already handles rather than around abstract function names
- Writing a team rule that every icon must carry a label instead of standing on its own

## Composition recipe

- Typography & lettering: Put a short noun label under every symbol. The label names a thing on a desk, not a function.
- Layout & structure: Treat the screen as the surface of a desk and place objects on it. Keep commands in menus rather than embedding them in the objects.
- Material & texture: Work in two tones only and draw the symbols as outlines. Fill is either solid black or left white, with no intermediate greys.

## Colour

Read off the reference works below, so a direction rather than a fixed palette.

- Ground: #FFFFFF
- The colour it is remembered by: #9A9A9A
- Text and outlines: #000000

## What to avoid

Stretching the desk metaphor to cover functions that have no desk equivalent breeds symbols nobody can name or find.

## Application checklist

Work through this before calling a piece an application of this style.

- [ ] Visible in the piece: Every symbol on screen carries a text label, so meaning never rests on the picture alone
- [ ] Visible in the piece: The symbols stand for things found on an office desk: folders, in and out baskets, file drawers
- [ ] Visible in the piece: Objects are grabbed with the pointer, and moving, copying and deleting form one family of gestures
- [ ] Visible in the piece: The spreadsheet appears as a grid of rows and columns, with a menu of tools that act on the matrix
- [ ] The layout follows: Treat the screen as the surface of a desk and place objects on it. Keep commands in menus rather than embedding them in the objects.
- [ ] The lettering follows: Put a short noun label under every symbol. The label names a thing on a desk, not a function.
- [ ] The material and surface follow: Work in two tones only and draw the symbols as outlines. Fill is either solid black or left white, with no intermediate greys.
- [ ] The colour relation holds: #FFFFFF as ground, #9A9A9A carrying the style, #000000 for text and outlines
- [ ] At least one reference work below has been studied directly
- [ ] The caution above ("What to avoid") has been addressed

## Related styles

- **Apple Desktop Interface (アップル・デスクトップ・インターフェース)** — 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. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/apple-desktop-interface
- **1-Bit Icon Design (1ビットアイコン)** — The way of drawing icons in nothing but black and white that Susan Kare established for the Macintosh. She worked each design out on graph paper with one square standing for one pixel, and restated commands as ordinary objects, a pair of scissors for cutting and a bin for deleting, so the set could be read without a caption in any country. Her sketchbook now sits in a museum collection. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/one-bit-icon

## Compose it with something else

The dictionary can put this entry in a structural role and another in an accent role, and report where the two fight: https://indexstyle.org/compose?ids=xerox-star-interface+apple-desktop-interface

## Further study

- how the 1981 Xerox 8010 brochure explained its iconography
- when desktop became the word for the screen itself
- the Star development organisation led by David Liddle, and the 1998 restart of a working machine at the Computer History Museum

## Reference works

- Desktop and icons of the Xerox 8010 Star (ViewPoint) — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desktop%20icons%20for%20Xerox%20Star%208010.jpg
- Multilingual document window of the Xerox 8010 Star (ViewPoint) — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Xerox%20Star%208010%20ViewPoint.jpg
- Compound document screen of the Xerox 8010 Star (ViewPoint) — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Xerox%20Star%20ViewPoint.png

## Source of record

- Computer History Museum — The Xerox Star Runs One More Time — https://computerhistory.org/events/xerox-star-runs-one-more/

## Machine surfaces

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