So there are coffee table books with beautiful photos of Braun equipment, Apple computers, collections of corporate brand standards, typeface specimens etc.
But outside of some nostalgic video game coffee table books, have their ever been coffee table books showing primarily software? Graphical user interfaces or apps?
The closest I can think of is the macOS/iOS app icon book (by Michael Flarup), but that’s specific to icons.
@mwichary the In Your Face (too!) books are almost exactly that - specific to multimedia/interactive software in the mid/late-90s
@mwichary no! I'd love to see a book like this. There was so much experimentation in the late 80s that people no longer remember
@vga256 Oh, so interesting! I think this is both exactly what I was curious about, and exactly the opposite – this probably has a lot of flashy weird “agency” kind of stuff that I hate, rather than everyday UI worth celebrating. But I just snagged a used copy.
@scottjenson I’d love to see a celebration of more utilitarian kind of stuff. The most beautiful DOS apps, for example. Or particularly nice early Mac apps before the conventions solidified.
I was just looking at Scala on Amiga and look how beautiful!
(Source + kudos to Stone Tools: https://stonetools.ghost.io/scala-amiga)
@mwichary I have to admit my first reflex was "please, no, I spend all the rest of my time looking at software already!"
but it's not, of course, curated for its aesthetics 😂
@mwichary yeah - exactly. it's agency stuff, however they did pick some very artsy work for many of them. since almost all of them are bespoke UIs, they're at least something different from "here's windows 95" or "here's NeXTStep"
In my head, I can see a beautiful 17"x11" spread with a hypothetical Windows 3.11 CRT that’s 3000x2000 and it has a lot of windows, icons, Minesweeper, the goods. Especially the later “platinum” Windows 3.11 appearance.
You know? Stuff like that.
Early skeuomorphic iOS, early webOS, various Mac things of course, BeOS, the later Norton Utilities aesthetic, XCopy on the Amiga! TOS was always so elegant. And some lesser-known things. Newton?
@mwichary PC GEOS, the best Motif implementation that wasn't Motif.
@kickingvegas I resurrected some PC/GEOS pixel fonts and use them on my site! https://aresluna.org
@mwichary Not exactly what you imagined, it's video games again, but I can mention that my son has a rather attractive art book, a little smaller than coffee table size, called “Credit 00: I Love Game Graphics.” Software screens and logotypes adjoin promotional and hardware materials throughout.
IA owns a copy: https://archive.org/details/credit00ilovegam0000unse/page/n3/mode/2up
Early NeXT, obviously (a bit Unixy, but has some elegance)! Magic Cap?
There are probably some more strange and beautiful text-only DOS apps. Some particularly memorable semigraphics.
@mwichary Bonus points for including anything from the pixel-art-heavy Japanese pocket computers, or PalmOS.
@Screwtapello Yeah, @nina_kali_nina was just exploring one of them. That’d be a goldmine!
@mwichary I remember using MM200 on PC, for song words at a church of all things
@mwichary any Breadbox Ensemble love?
http://toastytech.com/guis/bbe.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system)
I mean look at this stuff!
This, or IBM 2260 also had this wild-looking font.
@colinstu I’m vibing more with early GEOS – I think the later you go the uglier it gets…
Reminds me of the Tektronix 4010s and 4014s we used to use. Vectors and persistent phosphor for the win.
Some of these are stark but maybe kinda beautiful – especially if you pair them with some of the nicer PC fonts?
🦆
@mwichary speed disk and Norton disk doctor (those were the days…) were the absolutely epitome of TUI to 15yo me
@raineer Especially when they started redefining the characters, they hacked the bright colors as background, and did the fake graphic mouse pointer!
@synack Thanks! I might have it somewhere! But that’s of course not real ha
@mwichary Surely you've seen Frank Grießhammer's talk about the Hershey fonts? https://coopertype.org/events/the_hershey_fonts
@onpaperwings Yes! Exciting to hear there’s a new edition coming.
@mwichary It's more of a textbook than a coffee table book but the closet example I have is Generative Design http://www.generative-gestaltung.de/2/
@mwichary There’s something so gorgeous about those old vector based crt displays.
@mwichary I have this hanging on my office wall so obviously I’m like game for the kickstarter or whatever haha.
Source in case anybody wants to support one of the icons behind the icons so to speak: https://kareprints.com/
Of course also stuff like Delicious Library, Winamp… I think the suspiciously short-lived iTunes 5 was also beautiful.
@mwichary I was gonna mention WinAmp. I didn't use its original incarnation but I do use the web-based version.
@mwichary I think a huge challenge is that UI design shines best when it is live. Capturing static UI images in a book misses out on a large part of it, which is how it responds to user input, and how it communicates changes.
I think a coffee table book of UI design will have lots of image series showing stills from an animation or an interaction sequence.
@drahardja But I do think creatively capturing some of the flows and animations would be important! For example the iconic Windows 95 file copying thing…
@drahardja I know what you mean, though. There’s a reason YouTube is good for movie reviews and analysis: because it’s a matching medium. There are entirely too many subtle states of things that would be completely missing in a paper book.
So… interactive coffee table website kinda thing? A tablet app? Interesting to think about. Emulation and/or simulation.
@mwichary Some day, we’ll have cheap, paper-thin e-ink that can refresh at 60 Hz at a touch, powered by a solar cell built into the book.
@mwichary I'm not aware of any such books existing, but for a few years now I've had in my head an idea to write one — and a growing feeling that it needs to exist. Are you planning a new project?
(If I were to pursue my idea it likely wouldn't be until next year, but I might not bother if you're doing something that overlaps heavily with it.)
@MossRC Oh, no, not at all. I have vague ideas for next few books (and a solid one for the next one) and this is not it.
If I’m pursuing anything like this it’d be more online/interactive, like my emulation settings essay last year, and probably more specific!
@mwichary Something interactive would be super cool, especially if the whole thing really feels alive — like a weird metamorphosing UI/software organism.
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@MossRC I had this idea of a lemming time traveler that just jumps between GUIs, a sort of an adventure game.
@mwichary that looks a lot like someone working with technical limitations on a vector based font.
Vector graphics in this sense is kind of wild in general since it isn’t far removed from an oscilloscope trace. To me it would seem theoretically far more chaotic to control than the strength of a raster beam tracing a screen ouroboros.
@mwichary sounds like something that the Bitmap Books would be a good fit for, although right now they mostly have game centric nostalgia books: https://www.bitmapbooks.com
Should you feel like you could pull such a book off, then they might be in, too: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/pages/book-submissions
@mwichary It’s not exclusively focused on software, but have you had a look at Bill Moggridge's “Designing Interactions”? Beautiful book, that.
Also, I'm not sure if your mention of “nostalgic video game coffee table books" includes this title, but “The Art of Point and Click Adventure Games" by Bitmap Books is absolutely gorgeous.
@Schepp I’m actually not a huge fan! I think their books are a bit too generic coffee table, a little too rushed to market. I think ROM Books would feel like a more caring publisher. Genuinely inspired by some of their output.
@mwichary oh, not heard of them before. Will have alook at their books!
@mwichary don't know of any books off hand besides ones that document patterns like Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks by Luke Wroblewski. I always loved the PLATO graphics and feel like they're not discussed much generally.
@mark Yes!!! Plato is genuinely beautiful. I got to use it at a museum in Seattle.
@mwichary @GeoffreyDorne just released this one about 90s-00s keygens:
@mwichary Don’t forget OPEN LOOK, one of the most stylish (IMHO) GUIs of the era, doomed to obscurity by Sun’s dog-in-the-manger attitude to intellectual property
@mwichary I bet the people that a book like this would appeal to still own most of the computers that would be featured in such a book
@mwichary
It’s not a coffee table book unfortunately, but the the PLATO project had emoji on plasma touch screens and did online educational community-building in the 70s
There’s pics in the book but not enough
More would make a great companion to its more wordy history
Even better with video showing any surviving plasma displays and touch interfaces in action
Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Plato System & the Dawn of Cyberculture
By Brian Dear
http://friendlyorangeglow.com/
@mwichary BeOS is very much alive with Haiku. And it’s very usable with thousands of apps.
is looking to #GetFediHired!
@yhancik Je vois que Scala 1.35 est sorti en 2025. Tu crois que je peux essayer d’ouvrir les projets faits à St-luc en 98 :)
@mwichary Magic Cap was THE BOMB! I bought 2 of them and went to the one and only General Magic get together! That's an initiative to bring forward in a Lightphone kind of way.