# Xerox Star Interface (ゼロックス・スター・インターフェース) — image generation prompt
# IndexStyle No.532 — https://indexstyle.org/styles/xerox-star-interface
# Style descriptors only. This prompt names no artist, studio, brand or work.

Produce four original images in the visual language of Xerox Star Interface, a style from Platform Screen Languages, 1981–1990s.

## What to make

Make the kind of thing this style exists for: laying out a business application around objects a user already handles rather than around abstract function names, or writing a team rule that every icon must carry a label instead of standing on its own. Choose one subject and hold it across all four images.

## What has to be visible

- 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

Someone who knows this style should be able to point at each of these in the finished image.

## How to build it

- Layout and 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
- Type and lettering: Put a short noun label under every symbol. The label names a thing on a desk, not a function
- Material and surface: Work in two tones only and draw the symbols as outlines. Fill is either solid black or left white, with no intermediate greys
- Colour: #FFFFFF carries the ground, #9A9A9A is the colour the style is remembered by, #000000 holds text and outlines. Read off real works, so treat them as a direction rather than a fixed palette.
- What it should feel like: technique, trust, futurity

## What goes wrong

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

## Across the four

Keep every cue above present in all four. Vary the framing, the scale and the arrangement so the set shows the range this style covers rather than four versions of one picture.

## Constraints

- Do not imitate, reference or name any specific artist, studio, brand, character or copyrighted work.
- Do not reproduce the composition of an existing work.
- Produce original compositions in the general period language described above.

Full design spec: https://indexstyle.org/styles/xerox-star-interface/design.md