Interface – in your face
Professional Tools
A well established trend for professional graphical software is that the interface should be neutral and occupy as little screen real estate as possible. This leaves the user free to focus on the artwork itself without unnecessary distractions. Adobe has a large collection of professional tools, and they have led the development of interface standards for years. The latest makeover of After Effect was a great example of improving on an already great interface.
The Horror!
My first impression is that Lightroom’s interface is quite disturbing in at least a couple of ways. I realize that it is still in beta stage, so the interface might change before the actual release.
The overall design looks a little webish – a little like “Bridge Center” in Adobe Bridge: This is especially true for the header with the global navigation. The typography is far too large and takes up too much valuable space, and there does not appear to be any way of adjusting the font size.
I find it very puzzling that Adobe has included the ornamental “glyphs” at the bottom of the left and right columns in a professional photo editing tool (see the picture above). The glyphs have no function, and I can’t see that they add anything but an element of distraction to the interface. The design trend of spicing up illustrations with organic vector ornaments has been around for a few years now, and it is already getting a little tired. I have removed the glyphs in the image below, and find it a lot better:
For those who agree that the glyphs have no place in a professional application, I have included a replacement that you can use to remove them from your application. If you are using a Mac, all you have to do is download the empty TerminationGlyph.png, quit Lightroom, and replace the image at /Applications/Adobe Lightroom/ Contents/Frameworks/AgUI.framework/Resources/ (right click on Adobe Lightroom and choose “Show Package Contents” to get all the way in there).
