I don't think I really agree with this. Making good visual design, or let's say in this case "clean" visual design, work is up to the designer. Taking for exam

I don't think I really agree with this. Making good visual design, or let's say in this case "clean" visual design, work is up to the designer. Taking for example the Opera 12 example I mentioned in comments above[0]: while I don't think Opera's overall UI design in 2011 was particularly visually pleasing, and certainly not as clean as Chrome's today, if you consider the UI pattern in isolation there's nothing preventing it from being done cleanly. Facebook uses the same UI pattern for the active state of its status input today. That's just one obvious example - I'm not suggesting it's the only one. Google's Material Design guidelines advocate a lot of context-crossing - the canonical example being the "Floating action button" attaching to sheets[1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13400645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13400645 [1] https://material.io/guidelines/components/buttons-floating-action-button.html#buttons-floating-action-button-large-screens https://material.io/guidelines/components/buttons-floating-a...