For the original poster, because they might be used to running primarily a
distribution-installed version of emacs: the code for unix-based GUIs has
supported a variety of these sorts of elements for a very long time,
depending (currently) on whether you build emacs with the Athena, Lucid,
Motif, Athena3D, or gtk[,2,3] toolkits. Under macOS, one has the ns and mac
ports, and under MS Windows, it uses the local gui toolkit (which I
believe is the core W32 look and feel, not the frequently-shifting WPF,
Windows Forms, Metro, UWP, etc. standards).  Even within these systems,
there are options inside emacs for giving buttons a 3D look or not, and
there are many packages that add icons to emacs' display (via fonts, as far
as I can tell) that can 'spiffy up' emacs considerably.

It would probably be helpful for emacs' adoption if some of these gui
enhancements could be added to emacs and/or ELPA more directly. To be
specific, it would perhaps be helpful for emacs new-user adoption if people
didn't feel the need to adopt a large integrated package like Spacemacs or
DOOM emacs just to get graphical niceties -- not because those bundles are
bad, but because they add a *lot* more than just the gui enhancements. The
past couple years has seen a bit of an explosion of packages like
better-defaults or "starter kits" that aim to improve the new-user
experience without such a large overhead, but those still require getting
emacs from somewhere other than GNU or the standard distrubutions, which is
an extra hurdle.

I would be happy to help with such an effort, but I'm unsure what sorts of
changes would be acceptible to "core emacs", and I don't personally have
anything major to add to the existing set of third-party starter kits or
mega-bundles. If someone here had a clearer idea, that would be helpful.
Maybe the first step is to try to get all-the-icons (
https://github.com/domtronn/all-the-icons.el) or an analogous package
included in emacs?

Hope that helps! Thanks,
~Chad

On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 10:16 AM Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> wrote:

> On 15.04.2020 17:31, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>
> >> I think the difficulty here is to look "contemporary" and yet fit every
> >> platform Emacs is run on. Button widgets look different on each. Even
> >> between GUI toolkits. And change between releases.
> >
> > There are only 2 variants: native buttons (provided by some toolkit)
> > or the ones we draw ourselves.  And there's no requirement that they
> > all look the same, I think: they should have the look-and-feel of the
> > toolkit being used.
>
> These are implementation options. But either the "ones we draw
> ourselves" are designed to fit each platform, or they looks the same
> across platforms, with our personal look.
>
> The latter option is sometimes taken by professional applications in
> which the user spends most of their time (e.g. Blender, or at least some
> of it earlier versions that I've tried).
>
> >> The other option, of course, is to look both modern and unique, but it's
> >> a harder proposition, especially without a graphical designer on the
> >> team. And this stuff gets outdated quickly.
> >
> > I think "modern and unique" is a contradiction of terms nowadays ;-)
>
> In principle, I disagree. But it's difficult, and it's a balancing act,
> of course, between having them look distinct and interesting, but still
> familiar enough, and not too "tacky" (meaning, a design too exotic can
> become an eyesore after a while). It's a problem that bigger companies
> put whole design departments on.
>
>