Nowadays embedded video players have a visual language to designate settings like sound, play/pause, progress bar, and of course fullscreen. But there was a time when a lot of that was surprisingly new to a lot of users, and getting out of fullscreen mode was a thing. Over at adultswim they used to have a Flash-based player whose fullscreen button actually said, “full screen.” Likewise when you went fullscreen, the option to escape from fullscreen mode wasn’t labelled as ‘exit full screen’ or ‘return’ or anything like that, but rather ‘normal screen.’ Fullscreen will always be different, depending on the user’s screen ratio and resolution. But normalscreen is the same for all because it implies a return to not-fullscreen, where the user is in control again.

[this post was originally drafted on June 11, 2008]