When designing your graphical application, it's likely that an early question will be around the visual identity; should the application fit within the operating system's look and feel or should it have a brand of its own? Do you want to work on a complete theme for the user interface that the user will identify with, or do you wish to make use of the well-crafted and commonly understood interface elements of the user's operating system?
As with most questions that we will encounter throughout this chapter, there is no right or wrong answer, and whichever path you choose will have positive and negative side effects. Going with completely standard components will likely result in faster development and be easier for users to understand, but how do you differentiate your app from others? If you design the complete application interface from scratch, then you will develop a good brand identity for the software that users will recognize, but it may take them longer to learn and it could look out of place on the platform you are targeting.
Different design approaches typically suit different types of applications. Games clearly rely on heavily customized graphical interfaces and rarely use standard components but their users, the gamer community, understand the standard interactions of the genre so don't need the common visual cues that using the operating system's default elements provides. Utility apps (those that you load to do a quick task alongside your current work) will benefit from blending in so that very little thought is needed to operate them and no identity needs to be associated with the experience:
Assuming that you have decided whether your visual design will fit with a standardized look or require a more bespoke approach, you need to consider the platforms you will deploy to. Is this an application designed for a single operating system or for many? If your software will only work on Windows, then using the standard look and feel could clearly be the way to go, but what if you are looking for a cross-platform distribution? macOS looks very different to Windows, which in turn is not the same as an average Linux desktop. Which do you target? Or, do you opt for the same interface design on all platforms?
The complexity of cross-platform GUI design is not a new problem, but it is one that requires some thought as you design the application experience. If you have a standardized interface design that works for your brand or application, will it apply equally well across different operating systems? Alternatively, if you aim to use standard components on each platform, how will you ensure a consistent user experience and how much more time will be put into support materials or your help desk?
When Java Swing was the standard for cross-platform graphical applications, their approach was unique: allow the developer to code against a standard API for building the GUI, but provide the ability for it to have different presentation modes, to look consistent across platforms, or to blend in with the system it is running on. This meant that the same application could be configured to look the same across all operating systems or to fit within the current desktop environment. Unfortunately, this method has its limitations, due to the way that it ends up providing a lowest-common-denominator set of functionality. Advanced integrations in one area would not be usable in a cross-platform app unless it were a feature of all supported operating systems.
Additionally, the user interface design can age badly on an operating system that changes look drastically from one release to another (such as Microsoft Windows moving from Vista to 7 to 10, each of which had quite distinctive looks):
Over time, the number of ways to build graphical applications has increased, with many options available for most programming languages. Some are designed to use the system style, some prefer their own graphical style, and others leave that to developer or user preference. And so you must choose: do you want your app to blend in to a standard operating system look, or are you aiming for a brand identity or design that looks the same on each system you will deliver to? We will explore both options in Section 2, Toolkits Using Existing Widgets and Section 3, Modern Graphical Toolkits of this book.