Hi,
It *seems* that the preferred placements of "shadows" (e.g., suggestive of 3D effects) is to the SE (i.e., as if illuminated from the NW).
Does anyone have any research as to the basis for this? Is it just something that "seems to look good/best"? Has anyone done more than *play* with alternative placements?
Thx,
--don
I always assumed it was simply a reflection of the draughting convention - light is always coming from above your left shoulder. Rationally people are used to light coming from above and it would look odd (an less clear) if it was directly downwards. Therefire you only really have two options - lighting from the top left or top right.
-- Andrew Smallshaw andrews@sdf.lonestar.org
Don Y sent on October 5th, 2011: |--------------------------------------------------------------| |"It *seems* that the preferred placements of "shadows" | |(e.g., suggestive of 3D effects) is to the SE (i.e., | |as if illuminated from the NW). | | | |Does anyone have any research as to the basis for this? | |Is it just something that "seems to look good/best"? | |Has anyone done more than *play* with alternative placements?"| |--------------------------------------------------------------|
I do not have the research which you requested, but I recommend the SE. GUI software other than from Microsoft sometimes are annoyingly, deliberately programmed in petty defiance of Microsoft customs: such as the minimize; in-between; maximize; and close buttons not being located in the NE of a window (or not looking like what they usually do; or in-between and maximize using the same button) or the scrollbar being located on the left.
(Microsoft is not innocent. Features are arranged in different menus in different versions of Windows and Office. However, most inexperienced users are more used to Microsoft customs so there is no point in making your product harder for them to use.)
It might also be interesting to see if the usual shadowing of text is different in languages that read right to left.
Having the 'light' coming from the top of the page seems more in line with the way people view real documents---we hardly ever look at things with the light source lower than our eyes.
Mark Borgerson
Yes. In my case, I was evaluating the placement of a display
*high* on a wall (above eye level). I had displayed a large (analog) xclock(1) just to get a feel for what it (the display) would look like in that position. It took a while of careful observation to identify why it "looked wrong" -- the shadows *drawn* on the display weren't where you would expect them on a *real* clock located in that same place.Hence the genesis of the question.
OK, so why the left instead of the right? ;-)
Look to the film industry. They have some informal standards the have been consistent in the North America. I don't have a reference but it came up in a conference I was at a few years ago on life like animation. You might want to look into lighting standards in movies. After the conference I was looking at shadows in every movie I watched for the emotion meaning they were supposed to convey.
w..
MS isn't the be-all to end-all re: GUI design. There *are* other "standards". Some window managers are even smart enough to let the *user* decide where the controls lie! (what an amazing concept -- "not being dictated to with criteria changing arbitrarily between product releases" :> )
Personally, I liked the *old* MacOS concept of putting the "controls" for the "active window" across the top of the screen. A *lot* of real estate is wasted in Windows for all those menus/buttons that aren't *usable* while the window doesn't have the focus.
Actually, my question wasn't associated with GUI design but, rather, just an *observation* of the direction of shadows.
Sort of like the "10 and 2" (vs. "4 and 8") display of clock hands...
Hmmm... I never considered that! I.e., is the shadow chosen to subtly be suggestive of the direction our eyes tend to move?
Hmmm... the emotional aspect is more in tune with film (than, e.g., automation, etc.). I imagine the deliberate manipulation of shadow is intended to *counter* what we normally expect to increase anxiety, etc. E.g., long shadows, dark(er) shadows, etc.
Similar to the "large eyes" intended to convey innocence, etc.
But, this sounds like it would be an interesting topic to pursue! Thanks, I'll see if google yields any interesting results along those lines.
Well, they are called 'drop shadows' ;) Electronically, a simple L-R is easier, so you can see that on simplest Character insertion systems.
Because the sun is overhead, it is natural for a shadow to fall below, and we tend to favour a leading diagonal, so that could be why the shadow goes that way ?.
Plus, that is also 'positive time' in both axes, so you render the letter first, then render the shadow.
Then you could argue left-justify is most natural english/euro format, and you want the letters to dominate the left-edge alignment so that makes the shadow-right the natural choice.
Plenty of reasons...
Most people are right-handed. Placing the light source to the left keeps the shadow cast by your "active" hand out of the way of what it's working on.
Even that is the result of unstated conventions that are not universally held. It's is the way you and I may think of it since we are thinking in terms of a raster scan or the way most image formats work.
There are exceptions. I've seen comments in source code accusing the FITS image standard of being "bizaare" because it works "backwards", starting at the _lower_ right, working right and then up. It may be different to most image formats but it makes perfect sense to the astronomical community who are the biggest users of the format. They view the image as a graph and logically the axes would be placed on the left and along the bottom.
Completely different conclusion to what everyone thinks, but perfectly logical when viewed from the right starting point.
-- Andrew Smallshaw andrews@sdf.lonestar.org
Most raster image formats work that way because video memory starts at the top left, which in turn is because the raster scan normally[1] starts at the top left.
[1] On computers intended for Arabic/Hebrew/Farsi markets, it was (is?) common for the monitor to have a switch to reverse the horizontal raster direction, avoiding the need forthe software to explicitly handle right-to-left text.Graphic APIs tend to be a mixed bag.
Some have their origin in the upper left, either because video memory starts in the upper left, or because that's more logical for displaying text, or because the "canvas" is treated first and foremost as an array of pixels and arrays/matrices are normally represented with the first entry in the upper left.
APIs which treat the canvas as a region of the Euclidean plane and try to ignore pixels (e.g. PostScript, OpenGL) tend to follow the convention for graphs, and have the origin in the lower left. Such systems tend to treat raster data similarly, e.g. data for OpenGL textures starts with the bottom row. Such systems normally support arbitrary coordinate transformations, so it's easy enough to create an upper-left coordinate system, but this has its own complications (e.g. clockwise becomes counter-clockwise).
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