Any UI toolkit has a series of elements that get re-used throughout an interface—checkboxes, dropdown menus, lists, and so forth. Typically, Duarte says, each one of gets “designed on a silver platter”—a lot of time is spent making each one beautiful in its own right, with beveled edges, perhaps, and a full 3-D feel. The problem with that, Duarte says, is that when you assemble the individual elements on a screen, each one becomes prominent on its own. (Go ahead, pull out your iPhone, and look at a contact card, for example. See how each element on that card seems to have equal weight?)
Duarte says that overwhelms the layout. He compares the overly designed elements to pieces of Victorian hand-carved ornamentation. “Each is very pretty, but when you try to make a wall or a house out of them, all the embellishments fight with the larger building.”
