I tried out Balsamiq Mockups the other night. It’s a drawing program for drawing “mockups” or “wireframes” of graphical user interfaces; the results deliberately look as if they were casually hand-sketched. But it was a bit of a trip outside my normal user-interface world, which mostly consists of Emacs, into a place with YouTube and its expanding fading pause and play symbols, and video thumbnails sitting on a virtual reflective surface, and ripples coming from some guy’s mouse cursor as he records a screencast, and giant semi-transparent letters zooming in from the right to provide UI feedback and then falling down and fading away, and translucent nonmodal dialog boxes that become mostly opaque when you mouse over them, all very shiny and polished and impressive. The contrast between all this impressive shiny stuff and Balsamiq’s output was especially noticeable. The impressive stuff is a big part of Apple’s branding, and it’s very fashionable in the computer world now. Reflecting on this, I said, on IRC: > this guy who was doing a video review of it had ripples coming > from his mouse pointer when he clicked, so you could see in the > screencast when he was clicking > and everything had things zooming around the screen and zooming > in and out and fading in and out with spiffy reflections > I think it is about time for wabi-sabi UIs to come into > fashion How do we get wabi-sabi in our software user interfaces? How do we achieve the quality without a name? How do we celebrate randomness, mistakes, and accidental juxtapositions in our user interface designs? How do we make user interfaces that are unstudied and inevitable-looking, unpretentious, with craftsmanship that may be impossible to discern? How do we create beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete? How do we make manifest in our user interface that nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect? How do we make user interfaces that are "not quite symmetrical", like a tea bowl? These ideas are the polar opposite of all of the shininess and chrome in Apple’s standard user interfaces, a shininess which is reflected even in the physical objects in which they are embodied (very much at the cost of the readability of the LCD). Apple’s current structure is very focused on top-down control, where the whole company works to manifest the creative vision of a small number of people — to the point that most of their users aren’t even allowed to install unapproved software any more. What do we see if we look in the other direction? There’s a point of view that software should be adaptable by its users, because its original authors can’t know what the users need. It says that software should constantly change through its interaction with people. That software So, thinking about these ideas, I’ve started drawing a font. All of these aspects of the aesthetic (is that the word? “ideology” or “debate” maybe?) manifest in our fonts as much as in other parts of our system. Our existing fonts are geometric, regular, often with all the lines the same width (especially for monospaced fonts), with all the serifs the same size, mostly consisting of perfectly vertical and horizontal lines, and standardized everywhere. This doesn’t seem very wabi-sabi to me. I named the font “anami”, which means “nameless”. It’s fairly readable at a 5×12 pixel size. It has a lot of messiness and randomness in it. Here are some examples: - Although it’s nominally a monospace font, the escapement of different characters does vary by a little bit, about 1%. Unfortunately, this is quantized away on coarse display devices like 100dpi monitors. At 20 characters per inch, you’d need to accumulate changes of a two-thousandth of an inch to see it. I may bump up the randomness. - The lowercase q has a little hole on the right side of the bowl. - Many of the stems are at slightly different angles and curvatures, drawn with my mouse. I’ve only put a few hours into it so far. My idea is that I will keep adjusting it a little bit each day, so that it gradually adjusts to me.