: What is the GUI style called that is commonly used in sci-fi media? What do you call the style, trend or design commonly used by bodies mentioned in the title? I always see these designs

@Cofer715

The first one seems fiction, but something like this is already made by yose
here.

The second one seems real to me, made with rainmeter just grab some skins and make your own.

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@Marchetta832

There is no "toolkit" as it is pure work of fiction. I could name photoshop and video editing software I suppose.

In reality, the software you mentioned looks more like windows 3. Why is that? Software like that has to run for 10 years or more and has to be as simple as possible.

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@YK2262411

I cannot speak outside of my own limited experience. I worked at a company that designed some of the GUIs for the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) products. Actually, that's not quite true... we designed mock-ups used by our software. The final product was going to be shipped to the FAA, and their in-house designers were going to customize it from there (possibly throwing out everything we did and replacing it with their own graphics).

That being said, the company also produced a very similar product for airport towers outside of the FAA's jurisdiction. Most of these international customers received a locked-down version of a GUI that was locked down by us. I believe it was originally designed by a contractor hired specifically for that job. The designs were tweaked until the company liked the looks, and then that became the GUI. In our products' case, the controls were based off of familiar standard aircraft cockpit meters and controls, so that they would look familiar to pilots and air traffic controllers.

From my limited discussions with FAA personnel and some contractors who had worked with other U.S. agencies and departments, all of this was a fairly typical process. So, in short, there's probably no standard that exists across a wide range of implementations. Each project (or at best, each agency or department) defines its own requirements based on documented needs. In some projects, that comes down to the whims of one or two people. In other projects, it could be a large committee that takes years to decide.

In movies or on TV, I would think that it comes down mostly to the artist, production designer, director, and maybe the producers to decide what they think fits the story they are trying to tell.

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@Caterina889

These types if Ui designs are commonly created using Adobe Illustrator and then brought into Adobe After Effects for creating the video portion of the elements making them appear "in use". I don't know that they have a particular term or designation in regards to a theme.

They are in fact static short film clips and never truly functional UIs. Directors and film makers can not afford to have an actor mess up a simple UI task. So the UIs are added to the actor mimicking motions in post production.

Here is a link to a PDF from Adobe explaining the processes for the Iron Man UI.

If you have evidence that such UI designs are actually used in real life, I'd be interested to see that. As far as I'm aware, they are always fictional.

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