Peter Ponomarev

Background

Windows 7 was the first Windows release to feature the Ribbon as a common control. The Ribbon was introduced with the Microsoft Office suite of applications. WordPad and Paint were chosen as the in-box applications that would be modernized by featuring the Ribbon’s ease of use in finding commands.

INCEPTION

The first thing I did was to learn the rules of the Ribbon system. I read the extensive manual produced by the Office team and consulted with the Ribbon’s inventors. There is a defined logic as to how to order and group controls, as well as how the controls react to contextual elements and re-sizing of the application window.

Having digested the rules, I prototyped how the Ribbon could be applied to WordPad.

ELABORATION

After determining the optimal control organization, most of the work was visual. First, all of the visual pieces and styles had to be modified so that the Ribbon matched the rest of Windows 7 aesthetically. I worked closely with the development team, checking in assets and style changes into the code base myself. This saved a lot of time, as I could iterate as much as needed without needing a developer to check in changes.

Balanced against this was the constraint that everything below the Ribbon was in legacy code that was nearly impossible to modify. It became a delicate balancing act from a visual standpoint.

CONSTRUCTION

During construction one last feature was added: The ability to colorize the Ribbon. I worked closely with development to develop a system where the code would look for non-white colors in order to apply color changes. This necessitated changing all white values in all graphics to be slightly off, e.g. #FFFFFE instead of #FFFFFF. I also helped define the thresholds for the algorithm. I received a utility patent for my efforts.

DELIVERY

WordPad achieved what we intended. It was a model application to showcase the Ribbon and helped make Windows 7 feel improved over Windows Vista.