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Thoughts on transparency

March 23, 2008 in Engine & platform | 1 min. read
Placeholder image Unity 2
Placeholder image Unity 2
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Semitransparent GUI is all the rage these days. This is usually not a good idea. Here, I'll go into some of the details why transparency (mostly) sucks.

Transparency creates visual noise - our eyes are very good at edge detection, and having transparent stuff increases the number of edges that we have to process. Also, a lot of GUI has some sort of layering effect - either through shading, coloring or by using floating windows. Using transparency breaks this layering (in nature, very few things are partially transparent).

Who got the idea that having a large 50% transparent panel was a good idea? - you can neither see the panel nor the text beneath.Now, I said at the top that semitransparent GUI is ususaly not a good idea - let's take a look at where it does work:

March 23, 2008 in Engine & platform | 1 min. read

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