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Fugly Friday - skins and themes can make anything ugly
We love customization around here. Computers would be a sad, sterile place without being able to alter, to any degree, your workspace. Applications often provide "skins" for various reasons (usually just for fun). But the skins that provide a cool theme can also turn a workspace ugly in a hurry. In this case beauty is often in the eye of the beholder. Just as with clothes, there are plenty of skins out there I wouldn't put on my download queue, let alone my apps.
I'm going to leave full-on OS mods alone this round (with one notable exception of abandonware below). I'm sure everyone is familiar with WindowBlinds, etc.
Windows Media Player
The default UI is pretty bland, so MS has an enormous well of skins to choose from. I'm not sure what percentage of skins are marketing tools, but it looks like a pretty good number. Still, the sheer variety from amazing to totally fugly is staggering.
Coolplayer
There's definitely something to be said for bland, because Coolplayer's default skin is hideous. Red, orange and moldy tomato are not good color choices, nor is the wacky text layout which you should simply glance at for info. Lucky the thing is a nice player, I guess. I could keep listing music players with skins, but I'll leave them alone. Once you open that door, any kid with Paint can come along and thrash your look and feel. Maybe that's why OS X makes it so hard to radically change the look?
Kaleidescope
Speaking of Mac OS, this classic Mac OS goodie was a favorite of mine back in the pre-OS X days. There was an amazing variety of themes, and while I don't want to dwell on OS mods, I think Kaleidescope is a good example of the variety of artistry you find whenever customization is allowed. Still, while I love Masashi Ichikawa's work, I don't think I'd take a business client seriously if I saw their OS looking like KidPaint.
Firefox
Well, of course! Not only does FF let you customize the look, you can extend the functionality of the browser with add-ons, which also alters the look and feel. Version 3 of Firefox changed things a bit, but Mashable did a nice piece last year featuring the top 20 themes still compatible with v.3. I tend to use the default, as Foxlite (its name) works very well and keeps RAM issues to a minimum.
Judging from the comments we're getting so far, it sounds like "themes" for some apps would actually be welcome. QuarkXpress, Audacity and Office (2007 seems to be a love/hate thing) come immediately to mind... And perhaps that's why some apps are just hacked to look like something else. GImpshop makes the quite fugly-GIMP look a lot like Photoshop (not the most current version, but the layout is a welcome relief from Gimp's palette-and-window barf-a-thon). Sure, Blender allows you to completely redesign the interface, but the keyboard shortcuts and workflow remains untouched. And you can make Firefox look like IE7, but you won't get ActiveX controls to work on a Mac.
With any of these things, there's the tradeoff for looks vs. performance. They are called "skins" because the beauty rarely extends further than the presentation layer. Themes for browsers don't apply the power tools that add-ons or plug-ins do, either. But if you want to make your machine look bad in a hurry, skin it up indiscriminately.
I had a hard time narrowing my search and so I've intentionally left out a huge range of customizations out there that turn something nice into something horrific. Please dish in the comments!
Comments
8
Subscribe to commentssleaderFeb 20th 2009 4:02PM
Does anyone reading this know what "FUGLY" stands for?
Muffin_manFeb 20th 2009 4:31PM
F-ing ugly.
AbscissaFeb 21st 2009 1:13AM
As much as I like this column, I've always hated the *cough* word "fugly". Either use "Fucking Ugly" or just simply "Ugly" (Or hell, even "F*ing Ugly" if you insist on trying to marry swearing with PC-ness). But none of this making up redundant words nonsense.
Also, may I take this opportunity to point out that I find it quite odd that this article mentions that it's good to be able to customize one's computer, and yet, the text in these comment-entry fields are completely unreadable for people who, like me, have customized their system to use light-on-dark, thus forcing them to, as I'm doing now, write their comments in something sensible, like notepad, and then copy-paste them into this "Fugly" comment box. Talk about pots calling kettles black.
Simon ArchFeb 21st 2009 11:15AM
"But none of this making up redundant words nonsense."
Fugly is a perfectly cromulent word. English, unlike Latin, is a living language which means words come and go.
sleaderFeb 22nd 2009 2:16PM
It was a rhetorical question. I know what the contraction represents. I was a little surprised that someone would create a program and call it by that name.
EddieFeb 26th 2009 10:54AM
I don't like that this column includes themes. There are endless amounts of themes and you could go on forever talking about which themes are ugly for any particular product. I thought this column would focus on default ui's, which would make a lot more sense to me since more people associate it with the product.
But it's not up to me.
Victor Agreda, Jr.Feb 27th 2009 7:29AM
Don't worry, Eddie. I realize it's a rabbit hole we could spend all year in, which is why I got it out of my system early... From here out we'll stick to the default UI's, or whatever comes in the box.
EddieFeb 27th 2009 9:16AM
Glad to hear that.