I’m already on record with the contention that the high-touch, rendered and shaded school of aesthetics — as most prominently represented by Apple’s Aqua — is the inevitable future, probably, of user interface design. For a new Behavior project in which we’re building a series of interactive demonstration modules with Flash, we decided to take a crack at producing some really lush, ornate design comps as a possible visual solution. This is really my first concerted effort at this kind of Photoshop jockeying, so it’s entailed a good deal of extra time trying to learn the ins and outs of making dimensional widgets look convincing. It’s not all that difficult, but it’s not all that easy, either. I’ll tell you one thing, though: when I looked at the clock and saw that I’d spent almost six hours working on two buttons and a slider, I realized that this kind of work takes a long, long time.