So there are coffee table books with beautiful photos of Braun equipment, Apple computers, collections of corporate brand standards, typeface specimens etc.
But outside of some nostalgic video game coffee table books, have their ever been coffee table books showing primarily software? Graphical user interfaces or apps?
The closest I can think of is the macOS/iOS app icon book (by Michael Flarup), but that’s specific to icons.
I was just looking at Scala on Amiga and look how beautiful!
(Source + kudos to Stone Tools: https://stonetools.ghost.io/scala-amiga)
In my head, I can see a beautiful 17"x11" spread with a hypothetical Windows 3.11 CRT that’s 3000x2000 and it has a lot of windows, icons, Minesweeper, the goods. Especially the later “platinum” Windows 3.11 appearance.
You know? Stuff like that.
Early skeuomorphic iOS, early webOS, various Mac things of course, BeOS, the later Norton Utilities aesthetic, XCopy on the Amiga! TOS was always so elegant. And some lesser-known things. Newton?
Early NeXT, obviously (a bit Unixy, but has some elegance)! Magic Cap?
There are probably some more strange and beautiful text-only DOS apps. Some particularly memorable semigraphics.
Marcin Wichary
Doug Wilson