That tags with a rather old marketing trick. If you want something to look more valuable, you display it with plenty of space around it. If you place a ring in a case with a hundred other rings that ring looks less valuable then if you take the same ring and place it on a pedestal surrounded with velvet all by itself in the case. That caries over into the concept of not overcrowding and leaving areas with free space in them when you do graphics design. If the design looks too busy it looks like garbage. Give it some free space and it looks tons better. When we are designing an interface, we really are involved in a form of graphics design.

That makes perfect sense. But ad-aware does not have to deal with the data densities we have to. One approach is to offer a user preference to hide detail, but then the issue would be the visual (or layout) balance.

One way around would be to remove the borders (looks less crowded) and blend rather than contrast input and controll areas. I have even seen some really cool retro-ish GUIs that have green on black (like the old monochrome days) representations.

Did you get to check out the Word auto-shape fill effects stuff yet?