Eric Replied

Keeping with my current agenda of building upon a solid foundation upon which to build your interface, today’s lesson is extremely simple and borderline common sense: consistency. I don’t have anything new or groundbreaking for the UI community, but the topic is still important. What am I talking about? Textures.

Keep it Simple
As with choosing font, you should choose textures for their legibility. I know you don’t read textures, however a lot of text is placed over the textures and I cannot stress enough the importance of a good texture. There are numerous textures to choose from: some good, some bad, and some terribly overused. A quick/short list of terrible (or default) textures:

Banto
Blizzard (default)
Cilo
Glaze
LiteStep
Perl

By no means is that a complete list but it should give you a general idea of what to avoid when choosing textures.

Keep it Classy
Just like Ron Burgandy, you’ll want to have a sense of refinement. Sure it’s easy to just install that addon and forget about it, but wouldn’t you like your interface to somehow be just a little bit different than the rest? Something to help distinguish it from the masses? Of all the people that download any addon, a good portion of those never bother go beyond the default settings and can’t be bothered to change the appearance or textures of those addons. On the flip side, some people go crazy and pick seemingly arbitrary settings for their addons.

The Shame!
Here’s a perfect example of what NOT to do: badUI1*. I thought about hiding the name but that’s okay. On this screenshot you can see no less than five(5) separate textures throughout the interface. I know at least four(4) of those are the default (I’m unsure about SW_Stats). If for no other reason to change your interface, do it so you’re not wearing a brand new silk coat with cotton and cashmere patches (analogy courtesy of Eric). Another example of what not to do (sorry, Amelio): badUI2*. In Amelio’s defense, it is an old screenshot andhe has since improved his UI.

If you looked at these screenshots and you didn’t see anything wrong, stop reading now and go here.

*These screenshots aren’t terrible UIs, but those that best illustrate my point. 

SharedMedia the Savior!
Okay, so you know what you don’t want but you don’t know how to fix it. Well, in my first post I mentioned SharedMedia as a substitute to manually changing fonts. And as I previously mentioned, it is capable of doing the same with textures and sounds. This addon will allow you to have consistency throughout your interface. This simple change will make it look as though you’ve designing interfaces for years even if you’ve just started.

Here’s an interface I was toying with a for a few days in October:

It’s by no means great and far from perfect. But the one thing it has no shortage of is consistency. This is a typical outcome simply due to SharedMedia. A single texture used throughout all addons, as well as only two fonts.

If interested, there are additional fonts and backgrounds available for SharedMedia on http://files.wowace.com. Hal also designed an amazing compilation of textures that can be found here.

Look, I’m Jerry Springer!
Default wouldn’t be bad if it all mods followed some rules of standardization. Unfortunately, there are no such rules. Where’s the value in bothering to clean the UI? Well, you won’t be mocked in other people’s blogs when your UI is seen by me, I suppose.

-JM

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 8:22 pm.
Filed under WoW UI.
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