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The look and feel of a graphical user interface comprises aspects of its design, including elements such as colors, shapes, layout, and typefaces. (the "look"), as well as the behavior of dynamic elements such as buttons, boxes, and menus (the "feel"). The term look and feel is used in reference to both software and websites.
Look and feel applies to other products as well as software GUIs. In documentation, for example, it refers to the graphical layout (document size, color, font, etc.) and the writing style. In the context of equipment, it means refers to consistency in controls and displays across a product line.
Look and Feel in Operating Systems
Look and feel in Operating system User interfaces serves two general purposes. First, it provides branding, helping to identify a set of products from one company. Second, it increases ease of use, since users will become familiar with how one product functions (looks, reads, etc.) and can translate their experience to other products with the same look and feel. Some companies try to copyright their look and feel.
Apple Computer was notable for its use of the term look and feel in reference to their Mac OS operating system. The firm tried, with some success, to block other software developers from creating software which had a similar look and feel. Apple argued that they had a copyright claim on the look and feel of their software, and even went so far as to sue Microsoft, alleging that the Windows operating system was illegally copying their look and feel.
Despite provoking a vehement reaction in the software community, and causing Richard Stallman to form the League for Programming Freedom, the expected landmark ruling never happened, as most of the issues were resolved based on a license that Apple had granted Microsoft for Windows 1.0. See: Apple v. Microsoft.
The new version of Microsoft Windows, Windows Vista, uses transparency in ways similar to Apple's Mac OS X GUI, and contains features with almost identical icons, such as Spotlight and the magnifying glass icon.
Look and Feel in Widget Toolkits
Contrary to Operating system User interfaces, for which look and feel is a part of the product identification, Widget toolkits often allow users to specialize their application look and feel, by deriving the default look and feel of the toolkit, or by completely defining their own. This specialization can go from skinning (which only deals with the look, or visual appearance of the widgets) to completely specializing the way the user interacts with the software (that is, the feel).
The definition of the look and feel to associate with the application is often done at initialization, but some Widget toolkits, such as the Swing widget toolkit that is part of the Java API, allow to users to change the look and feel at runtime (see Pluggable look and feel).
Some examples of Widget toolkits that support setting a specialized look and feel are:
- XUL (XML User Interface Language): The look and feel of the user interface can be specialized in a CSS file associated with the XUL definition files. Properties that can be specialized from the default are, for example, background or foreground colors of widgets, fonts, size of widgets, and so on.
- Swing supports specializing the look and feel of widgets by deriving from the default, another existing one, creating one from scratch, or beginning with J2SE 5.0, in an XML property file called (skinnable look and feel).
"Look and feel"