The Lollipop Gloss

There is nothing more mainstream-looking nowadays other than the reflective and translucent look.

It all probably started with the Motorola donning their mobile phone device with highly reflective mirror cum screen. When any there is incoming calls or pending SMS comes, these flat area acts as normal 65k colour LCD displaying phone numbers and names of caller.When the device is in its standby mode, the piece if display surface turns into a highly reflective ala handheld vanity mirror. Wau! Obviously, there is nothing amusing or spectacular about it, since, I find it handy to monitor facial petrol levels or any new pimple breakouts. duh.

The trend also lingers to other gadgetry where LCD screen played a pivotal role. Digital cameras for instance. Some of those point and shoot happy-go-lucky thin profile cameras even spot some of those highly-reflective LCD’s. Someday, it would take over those 22-inchers LCD screen for computers. Placed in avant-garde hair saloons to entice their visitors with visual feast rather than backdated fashion magazines during long perm sessions.

Highly reflective or reflection trends spanned beyond the manicure, pedicure realm. Operating systems are amongst those who resort to reflective look to enhance user experience. Apple for instance, starting with their Mac OSX Leopard released in October 2007 begun to spot reflective dock. In which any application windows that hovers above the dock shall be reflected by the dock. Like sunrise reflected by waters along the seaside. Then the concept of ‘reflection’ is further applied in other software such as the infamous iTunes and its propertiary cover flow. The album covers can be seen animatedly moving left to right according to our command, and along the black background, there would be shadows of the album reflected on the dark background. Like a collection of album art hovering on top of thick slimy glossy black liquid. More shockingly, the OSX Server version also features the reflective and translucent rich interface which puts some graphic-glamourina into the business software.

The Microsoft camp which proudly retains their ‘serious and cooperate software’ image now started to have second thoughts on reflective interfaces and icons. You would have slightly a bit of idea how Windows interface were designed. Look at the flop and bug ridden Windows ME which buttons and icons were rather flat-out,2D, inanimate compared to Mac OSX’s Aqua interface and Carbon graphic engine . Luckily, by now, the Microsoft did move away from serious and cooperate look to a more eye-candy Vista interface. The Windows Mobile6 also started to tweak its graphic codes to enable animated, translucent and reflective rich interface in a palm of hands. The Mobile6 drastically differs from Mobile5. Like a whole new system altogether except for the ‘Start’ button on the top left. What made Mobile6 made this kind of paradigm jump? The iPhone interface looks young and vibrant. We all have to admit that though.

Material wise, I saw a Samsung printer clad in highly reflective glossy plastic sometime ago. It was really suave and neat design. With its blue LED blinking, the matching is rather casual and at first glance, the printer is likely to be assumed as a mini beer fridge than a set of rolling, squirting and sliding mechanism in a mass-produced plastic casing. I was impressed. Samsung, the Korean electronics giant would be the flagpole holder in glossy plastic device. Admittedly, I’m not a big fan of Samsung which had less Zen compared to its Japanese counterparts in terms of mobile phone design. But, Samsung did throw a stone to create a ripple effect on a lake. The Samsung LCD’s had utilized the reflective and glossy look for one of their LCD frame series. I think it became a quick hit for LCD hunters. Rather than ordinary black and textured light-absorbing black or grey plastics, Samsung showed the possibilities of using glossy plastics in variant of black and white for its LCD, plasma frames. It was just simply brilliant. I visited one of the electrical appliances shops and quickly took a hold on those shining 42-inchers. Ahh! A popcorn, Forrest Gump Blu-Ray, a fun-loving girlfriend and one of these LCD would complete me – my mind drifted away.

Other electronic giant which seems to follow suit in reflective design would be HP. This American electronics giant had quick hit products like the Pavilion DV laptops which upper casings were made of glossy, reflective plastics with intricate lines and graphic motives. Pop one of those at the college library, and the material would brilliantly ‘bend’ lights at its curves as if it’s a powerful light sucking black hole. Although its not reflective enough to be able to watch any pimple breakout on the face, still the surface finishing had a certain class of personalization which differentiate it from other seriously boring ThinkPad-esque laptop.

Graphic wise especially printed one also sees the sudden interest in reflective and translucent features. Typography in website or printed-ads now is having shadows on its own, as if those letters sits on a ceramic floor. Browse the dailies and you would probably stumbled upon a few advertisements like slimming therapy which models flaunt their body on top of its reflective shadows. Factories which had obtained their ISO’s made their certificate floating with its exact twin reflected directly underneath it without any skew or distortion. Companies selling their products with the physical superimposed in mentioned above manner. Its everywhere now!

It all boils down to production technology which allowed more vibrant colours and smaller droplets of ink to be printed. Allowing effects of transparency, translucency, opacity, and gradient possibly appeared more robust and realistically. Material research and production made highly reflective LCD a trendsetting and giving a multirole for this already important element of electronic devices. Giving it a personal touch. Operating systems were not just cranking up codes 1000 lines long to create translucent, glossy and beautiful eye-candy windows, but the advancement of colour display from 16-bit to 32-bit to 64 and beyond dilates the possibilities of creativity. From the days of our fathers ATM screens were mere black and green Tron-like display, now, we are seeing more colourful ATM screens with animations and stuff. What next?