Where’s Mr. Inconsistency

Windows Media Player in Vista inconsistency

Blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, orange! This has me stumped. Also note the upside down page.

If they changed all of the icons, great. If they changed none of the icons, great. But don’t just change one icon.

Update: I must admit they’re all great icons. They’re extremely detailed and are great to look at in their full resolution. But I just can’t draw the connection between a predominantly blue application (default WMP skin is colored blue) with a predominantly orange icon. Obviously the WMP icon has to change since its a Windows branded application, but maybe the file-type icons needs a hue adjustment to match the new cyan?

14 insightful thoughts

  1. I kinda agree with Morten, at least I woudn’t expect consistent styles of the program to the types it supports, but that upside down corner? and the lack of reflections on some? thats pretty lazy.

  2. Bit of a strange observation here!

    Icons come in all shapes and colours, but at least in Vista they have slightly coordinated styles between the file type icons and the program icons – as others have already said.

    I love the icons in Vista.

  3. *kills new icons in Vista*

    Erm, did I do that? *sough* Anyways, the up-side-down corner thing is really – lame. Needs to be fixed, so yeah. (Probably a UBER easy fix too!)

  4. Orange? Who cares! It’d be ugly in blue!

    What are those things supposed to be glass chopping boards? That shade of green reminds me too much of dirty river water with some nice blue-green algae!

  5. Unbelievable, Vista’s UI design is a complete disaster. This happens when developers are doing design stuff…

    Dear Vista Design Team: please go home and let the Office, Xbox and Zune designers show you how to make a professional user interface.

  6. This doesn’t seem to be as bad as you think. All the file icons have one style, while the application icons have a different style. This makes them stand out more. As for the upside-down page, it’s used as a UI element, so it’s probably upside down for a purpose.

  7. Am I the only one who thinks that extension text (AVI, WAV, MP3…) in the icon picture totally sucks?

    @Rowan Lewis: I believe you have the point with the color. Definitely “Algae” fits the overall Vista GUI better than “Aero” 🙂

    AERO == Authentic, Energetic, Reflective and Open.
    ALGAE == Awful, Lame, Grungy, Atrocious and Emotionless.

  8. Why is the kerning between the letters of M P E G and W M V so frickin’ huge?

    In my opinion, the file format icons (ones that look like pages) look really boring and super corporate.

    Plus, whenever I see hot air balloons I think of Corel Draw software or Remax Realty.

    Boo!

  9. Filetype = perfect icon in every way
    WMP icon = incredibly bad, need to go back to the drawing board ASAP. Ok it’s not BAD, but it def. doesn’t fit in with the filetype icons.

  10. How did you extract the icons? I’m looking for these icons to use with windows…I know they come with WMP, but Windows 7 no longer let’s one keep the icons when playing music files with another application.

    Do you happen to have these as .ico, transparent and all?

    Thank You

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