14 ms·

The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

275 points by flowerlad 6y ago

sandGorgon 6y ago
here's a very interesting take here - about art deco being the design for the next few years https://vanschneider.com/art-deco-will-be-the-visual-language-of-2021 https://vanschneider.com/art-deco-will-be-the-visual-languag... However, I also believe that the Bauhaus way of using flat designs with interesting shapes and motion will be an interesting path forward
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Whatever you think of Art Deco - and personally I loathe it, but that's incidental - IMO it would be a tragic failure of imagination to try to reincarnate a design style that's already a century old. Likewise for Bauhaus design - also a century old. There are hints of a new generative aesthetic - busy in an unhierarchical repeated-elements kind of way, with organic influences - but that's better suited to architecture and sculpture than commercial design. There probably won't be a completely original design language until AR/VR become ubiquitous - which will take a while.
  - sandGorgon 6y ago
    In a lot of ways, material design is Bauhaus.
- majewsky 6y ago
  I don't have any experience in art history or design, but judging by the photos in your article, you seem to be conjecturing that in 5-10 years, everything is going to look like a Wes Anderson film. :)
aimor 6y ago
"Pendulum swings" are going to shake off everyone else at different rates and we're going to be stuck with an eclectic mix of designs. This already plagues Windows (Ribbon, legacy settings) and Android (square, squircle, circle, triangle icons). I don't think people are able to distinguish between what's new and old anymore. Aesthetics will finally be free from corporate trend setting and maybe we'll feel comfortable doing our own thing.
- dagmx 6y ago
  The difference though is that on Windows you have to specifically choose visual styles to some degree. On Apple systems, as long as you’re using the native frameworks, the framework itself handles a lot more of the visual update. Both methods have their pros and cons, but you’re less likely to see an aesthetic divergence on iOS/macOS
- x3haloed 6y ago
  The pendulum swings are not the problem. They have been around forever. The problem, on Windows at least, is that they no longer take the time to finish their work, they don’t give developers standard frameworks to gracefully upgrade automatically to new schemes, and they change their minds so often with little warning to developers that devs don’t have time or patience to keep up. The difference with Apple is that they finish their work, and the pace of change is much slower.
- kkarakk 6y ago
  you forgot teardrop on android, which i use coz it's so hilariously bad but someone wanted it in so it got in. aka google PM syndrome
nathanaldensr 6y ago
Of course this author's happy--they're a designer. Meanwhile, everyone else has to absorb the burden of the "pendulum" ceaselessly swinging, retraining their brains yet again to absorb new visual memories and habits. There seems to be no such concept as "good enough."
- Razengan 6y ago
  I'm a user and I'm also happy. :) Change is fun. Being stuck with the same aesthetics for much longer than 5 years sounds like a special circle of Hell.
- merrvk 6y ago
  Keeps them in a job i guess
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  Programming is currently hating on OOP, in love with strong typing, and somewhere on the way from loving microservices to disowning ever to have spoken in their favor. Ten years ago, it was the opposite. So this particular quirk of thinking in groups doesn't seem to be confined to the design domain. Nor do "swings of pendulum" preclude the pendulum also having some forward momentum in sum. Think of it as a skier's waving, or a sailboat crossing against the wind, and the sideways motions is actually required for any forward motion to happen.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - 8ytecoder 6y ago
    Some of the things you mentioned are pure aesthetics - and they change with time - forward and backward. Some others change with the advent of tools and other developments. Micro services are hard to do right and they have been hard. But people rushed into it. With better tools in the future that might change. Same with beginner/new projects embracing dynamic programming. It’s perfect for a new code add. It bites only later; when the enthusiasm has died off and you got to keep the codebase and tests up to date and things start slipping here and there. Go is a darling now because it’s constraining. It skipped passed the last three decades of advancement in languages like they never happened. And then as it becomes way more popular people will ask for the same set of features that other languages have had forever.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
I wonder if Apple will ever let people install app icon libraries to change the appearance of default apps. That would be fun (at least I remember having fun as a kid doing that on Windows 95).
- xoa 6y ago
  AFAIK (haven't kicked the wheels on macOS 11 beta yet) you can still manually change all the default icons? I do anyway, I always hated Apple's new ones and found a perfect set I liked instead. All default system icons are still just icns bundles at /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources And could always just be swapped with whatever you want. With the advent of SIP it's now somewhat more involved since SIP needs to be turned off, icons changed, then back on, or else a specific exclusion done just for that directory. So it's harder now to just have an application or scripts to manage it all automatically and make it trivial to swap sets around at will. But if you're just interested in changing things once in a while (or merely after system updates) it's not a huge lift even now. And applications themselves as well as disk icons, specific folders and so on can all have their icons changed same as always.
  - sirn 6y ago
    Not sure if it's possible for default apps (I don't have a Mac right now), but can't you just open a Get Item dialog, drag & drop an alternative icon onto the icon displayed in the dialog to replace it? (& click the icon, press delete to restore)
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  Remember that app in the 1990s that allowed heavy-duty customization of the OS? Was it called Kaleidoscope? Can't remember. I know that it could do things like apply a "steampunk" theme, where all the scrollbars turned into brass poles, with green leather handles for the thumb button. Some of the themes were vomit-inducing (most of them, actually), but it did have a couple of great ones.
  - compressedgas 6y ago
caiobegotti 6y ago
This kind of design ban lift is very welcome, as it brings a freshness to things again (speaking as an user specifically), but I sincerely hope this doesn't become a short-time cycle thing with Apple dictating the new UI motif of the next 5 years only to change it back and then back again and back. My memory of the change from skeuomorphism to a more flat colorful design is that it was rather abrupt across UIs everywhere in the industry, not to say a bit "traumatic" to some people probably.
- kkarakk 6y ago
  well it didn't shift coz of apple alone, they're just the largest visible adopters. as someone said in this thread, skeumorphism started looking really strange and is tough to do on high rez screens and varying form factor screens
deleted 6y ago
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vffhfhf 6y ago
What if we could give complete control of visuals to user? I use kde nowadays and the amount of customization is awesome. I am using chrome OS theme with tela icon pack and a cool ass animated mouse pack. And its frankly awesome. I feel like Apple is stagnating.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  I kinda like the ability to customize the Linux desktop. But in practice, I always end up with some major problems and many edge cases where my choices just don't work. A recent example was some web view showing a change log that respected the font color settings but not the background, resulting in white-on-white text with my dark UI. I'm probably far more willing to spend time on such issues. But I never got to a place where I felt I was "done". In that sense, Linux only demonstrates the difficulty of UI choices, and how it may not be possible to leave it to users. Hell, it's not even possible, apparently, to leave to application developers, judging by the state of the non-customized Linux desktop. Design may be a creative endeavour that requires a competent dictator, and cannot be done in the bazaar-model of OSS. (That, of course, is on top of the rather large number of flaws of any given Linux UI. Seriously: after reading much praise and endless criticism of MacOS here on HN, I gave (K)Ubuntu another shot. And the only possible conclusion is that Apple and Linux are measured on widely different scales.)
  - shaan7 6y ago
    > And the only possible conclusion is that Apple and Linux are measured on widely different scales.) +1 They are simply designed for different end users - and that is fine. I used macOS for ~5 years before getting fed up with the limited window management - but I understand why it is that way - most people don't care. So people who do, can just use KDE et al, peace.
- paulcole 6y ago
  > What if we could give complete control of visuals to user? This would be a terrible idea. People complain (in the comments on this very page) that Apple’s professional designers do a terrible job. You think my uncle is going to do better?
caiobegotti 6y ago
In case HN is bringing it down (as it seems to be the case now): https://web.archive.org/web/20200705130437/https://applypixels.com/blog/comeback https://web.archive.org/web/20200705130437/https://applypixe...
- jrockway 6y ago
  What's weird is that it fails at SSL protocol negotiation; Chrome says it can't agree on a SSL version or cipher. This is weird because the cert is issued by CloudFlare, who probably shouldn't fail TLS negotiation just because the backend is unresponsive. Very strange.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    On Firefox, I get SEC_ERROR_OCSP_UNAUTHORIZED_REQUEST, so there may be a problem with CloudFlare's OCSP server (?!?). But this is because I manually set security.ocsp.require = true in about:config. When I reset that to false, the page opens fine.
mekster 6y ago
Thank god the designs are being reconsidered from cheap flat looks but they now kind of look like toys with rounded corners for everything and are all square instead of having their own sizes. I'd still take iOS 6 design any day for iOS. Snow Leopard and iOS6 were their OS' peak.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  > Thank god the designs are being reconsidered from cheap flat looks but they now kind of look like toys with rounded corners for everything and are all square instead of having their own sizes. All that hype around "flat" was just that, hype. Design needs texture and depth, these are just core concepts of design. Doing away with texture or depth because somebody in the silicon valley decided it was outdated means that all these designers that jumped into the "flat bandwagon" didn't even understand what their job was about: not following trends but ACTUALLY designing for a public.
- harrygeez 6y ago
  I agree with you on macOS but I also like the current design. It's not that big of a departure and it looks modern without sacrificing anything. Can't say the same about Big Sur though... I used to feel the same about iOS but if you search screenshots of it now at least to me it really didn't stand the test of time.
alxlaz 6y ago
I don't really care about "fun", but I just can't find the words to explain how happy I am that there's a chance we might put all this flat madness behind us. I'm looking forward to: * Not having this conversation with my mom (who, at 60+, is remarkably adept with computers but hey, we all run into trouble sometimes) over the phone anymore: Me: Okay mom, now press the "Edit" button Mom: Which one's the edit button? Me: Uh, the... um, it's the one that kindda looks like... a bunch of lines in a rectangle, I guess? Mom: Alex they all look like lines in a rectangle * Not hovering everything for five minutes until I can figure out what I can click and what I can't click (for bonus points: not trying to click something for five minutes like an idiot, only to find out it's a label, not a disabled button) * Buttons, tree views, tabs and all that having relief borders again, not necessarily because I like that, but because without it, the only way to "isolate" the information in them is using whitespace, and seven years of flat design hell later I can fit only slightly more content on my 1920x1080 screen than I could fit my Amiga's 1024x768 screen 20+ years ago. * Being able to tell file types apart from each other when I'm browsing at minimum zoom level -- which is how you end up browsing any collection of more than a few dozen items or so * Being able to tell application icons apart based on what's in the icons, not based on colours. People keep parroting this idea that "symbolic icons are easily to tell apart from each other because they're so simple" but when all icons are a letter or some anonymous symbol on a blob of colour, they all look the same when you put a few dozen of them next to each other. Maybe they're easy to tell apart when you have like four 128x128px icons but when you have 40 of them in a tiny dock at the bottom of your screen, the only useful information they retain is what colour they are.
- artsyca 6y ago
  You've certainly given this a lot of careful consideration. Edit! First off I appreciate the hate keep it coming. Secondly it's like this dude had this list in his back pocket just waiting for this post to show up so he could get it off his chest. Now back to your regularly scheduled death march
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    >You've certainly given this a lot of careful consideration A hallmark of a good comment, you could say.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Anyone remember Kai's Power Tools? Now that was an interesting UI. https://www.mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html?utm_source=designernews https://www.mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html?utm_sourc...
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Does anyone know what happened to Kai Krause? Last I heard he was working on Something Interesting, and then silence.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    He's still around. He did help design a pretty cool fractal explorer app for the iPad (I have it). http://sub.blue/frax http://sub.blue/frax
  - weinzierl 6y ago
    He lives in Germany in the 1000 year old castle he bought in 1999 from the money he made from his ownership in the companies HSC, MetaTools and MetaCreations. The castle was not in the best state back then and was restored by Kai. Here is an aerial photo of the castle from 2009[1]. I lies on the Middle Rhine, a very beautiful area. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Burg_Rheineck_Luftbild_03.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Burg_Rhe...
    - ImprobableTruth 6y ago
      oh man, I didn't even know it was possible to just buy a castle. That's crazy cool
      - majewsky 6y ago
        They can be bought and sold like any other realty. Some are owned by the state (esp. those used as public museums) and not up for sale, though.
rvz 6y ago
Apple: We now have an all new redesign for macOS 11... Designers: Apple's done it again, Time to adopt neomorphism in our apps and the web, like we did with flat design and skeuomorphism. Me: About this battery...[0] [0] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/23/macos-big-sur-battery-history-and-estimates/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/23/macos-big-sur-battery-h...
- searchableguy 6y ago
  They went too far on that one. Do designers consider how expensive the gpu rendering is for skeumomorphism or neuromorphism?
  - quenix 6y ago
    What? It is? Forgive my ignorance, but isn't it just bitmap rendering? E.g. rending a flat icon should take approx the same GPU toll as a skeumorphic icon
    - jayd16 6y ago
      Flat design lets you make smaller 9 slices I guess. Smaller textures take up less ram but even that's a stretch.
      - _tw9j 6y ago
        I wasn't talking about icons alone in my second statement. :/ The design trend require soft shadows to be rendered on many elements in layers which I exaggeratedly pointed out. I apologise.
        jayd16 6y ago
        Shadows lead to overdraw I suppose, but I don't believe most UI frameworks draw front to back anyway. They end up accelerating it by making large, multi-element bitmaps of the final render. It ends up being a very small cost.
- 6y ago
antidaily 6y ago
Yay for some depth to design. Nay for the overuse of drop shadows (especially on Messages icon).
kumarvvr 6y ago
As with all visual systems, too much minimalism and too much noise spoil the experience. Ultimately, the context matters a lot. Not to mention the app, target users, complexity of the app, and what not. But I really hated those flat, borderless 'buttons' in earlier iOS versions. That's just stupid design. It's minimal for sure, but functionally.
karaterobot 6y ago
People sometimes forget that the move to flat design was not entirely arbitrary and driven by fashion, it was driven by shifting technology and usage. Sure, fashion played a role, but in this case the main driver was the need to support devices of different resolutions. Scalability implies vectors, which implies shapes, fills, and strokes rather than bitmap assets. As a designer who made "skeuomorphic" interfaces before the shift, supporting even a couple of different device sizes with hundreds of different PNG slices had already gotten unsustainable by 2010, and moving to a vector-based workflow was a breath of fresh air. The pendulum did swing a little too far: some of the early human interface guidelines were wary of the concept of lighting (gradients and shadows). But, realistically, that was unworkable, and those guidelines changed because nobody followed them. "Flat design" as a moment was actually pretty short. Later iterations on the concepts explored during that moment, such as Material, were actually thoughtful and workable, in my opinion.
- buboard 6y ago
  The web already had solved that problem, even with bootstrap version 2. Surely apple provides primitives such as border-radius and gradients, which are enough to create an eye-catching button?
  - baddox 6y ago
    The level of skeuomorphic design never really hit the web the same as it was on iOS before version 7. Remember the pool table green felt and wood trim of Game Center? That sort of thing is probably extremely expensive to design and maintain for the wide range of screens offered by Apple products.
    - deleted 6y ago
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- dehrmann 6y ago
  > early human interface guidelines were wary of the concept of lighting Someone needs to go out and patent using multiple ambient light sensors to detect where light sources are relative to a screen, then shade skeuomorphic elements accordingly.
caymanjim 6y ago
I think Apple went overboard with minimalism, flatness, and lack of texture. Walking some of that back is good. Recent Apple designs lack sufficient visual cues to differentiate functions. Some things ought to pop in some way to draw attention. But "fun"? No thank you. All that cutesy crap they used to have was distracting. There was no consistency at all. Yellow lined paper as the notebook background? Winking emoji? UI elements that change size? A color palette chosen by a toddler on LSD? This new "fun" is an unwelcome reversion. Apple finally dropped their misguided cuteness in hardware design and ditched all the rounded corners and pastel colors. Are they going to undo that too?
- huffmsa 6y ago
  There's a difference between fun and kawaii. You don't like kawaii. Fun is just that, it's fun. It doesn't make you say awww, but it does tug at the corner of your mouth. It makes you want to use what your using and do it again. But it shouldn't come at the expense of experience or speed. Slow is rarely fun.
- x3haloed 6y ago
  > I think Apple went overboard with minimalism. I’ll agree with you there. They went to every possible length to completely remove anything skeuomorphic, which made it much more difficult to determine the function of UI elements. There were very few relatable curs from the real world and everyday experience to help. I believe that Google’s Material Design is the best at balancing “digital authenticity” with physical cues. And the chief insight is that lighting and surfaces are really important in everyday human experience for determining what things are and what they do. (And we determine what is a surface primarily based on lighting. It’s really all about lighting.) Material buttons, for example, look pressable, because they are raised, which you can infer based on the shadow they cast. But! They don’t look like a picture of a button from reality. That’s the difference. It’s not trying to perfectly emulate a button - it’s just trying to draw on subtle cues that humans use to identify buttons. > But “fun”? No thank you. That’s subjective. But in some cases I think you’re confusing fun with extreme skeuomorphism. The lined paper, for example, is so skeuomorphic, that it relies on making the entire application looking almost like a picture of a real pad of paper on your desk instead of using subtle cues to indicate the purpose of the application. The photorealistic objects in the new app icons, however, are not necessary for indicating the purpose of the app. They’re there because they’re rich, complex, and easy on the eyes - AKA “fun” - in the way that a painting is fun. You could easily draw stick figures to show what you mean, but a painting is rich with detail, color, and emotion. If you don’t want a sense of artistry in your desktop environment, you could use Linux with a lightweight desktop. Many of them are perfectly dry, sterile, and utilitarian. Most people, however, do have an aesthetic sense, and enjoy some kind of artistic touch. That’s why car sales are predominantly based on design aesthetic. > Apple finally dropped their misguided cuteness in hardware design and ditched all the rounded corners and pastel colors. Are they going to undo that too? I doubt it. There’s a difference between “fun” and “toyish” - what you call “cuteness.” I would argue that the physical aspects of Apple products are fun today without looking like toys. They used to look like toys. The bubbly appearance with pastel colors gave them a childish quality. New Apple hardware is a pleasure to behold, but not childish. I think that same intention is clear with the high-fidelity pen rendering in the new icon shown in the article. It’s not a crayon or a calligraphy pen. It looks like a Bauhaus design. It’s a utilitarian pen that an adult would use. It enriches and beautifies the icon without being toyish. The messages icon, on the other hand, was less expertly executed, I think. How do you add a sense of beauty and richness to a chat bubble? I would argue that you don’t. It’s too simple of a shape/object to try to do that with. It ends up looking like a balloon. They should rethink it. And the battery icon that everyone hates is obviously a mess. That needs to be rethought for sure. Everyone is too concerned with the pendulum swing. When a pendulum swings, it never moves all the way back to its starting point. In this case, Apple started with full-on skeuomorphism and swung completely in the opposite direction - completely devoid of any kind of physicality to their design. And now the pendulum is swinging back, but will not go back to total skeuomorphism. What we’re seeing now is a refinement. A better balance between the two philosophies. An understanding that physical cues are helpful without needing to make the whole UI look photorealistic. And and acknowledgment that playing with light and photorealism with restraint can be pleasing. I like this direction, even if there are a handful of missteps.
artsyca 6y ago
Let me be the only leperous pariah in this thread to mention that the same rationale can be applied to the way we dress, as a culture of design professionals and engineers. Because UI trends can come in and out of fashion but hoodies and T's are for life I get it. Any ex-military in this thread understand the importance of dressing up to pass muster?
- kkarakk 6y ago
  Except even hoodies are going in multiple directions fashion design wise. techwear,leisurewear,exercisewear(as seen in avengers infinity war) etc
  - artsyca 6y ago
    Total bullshit. The hoodie went out with the tonsure in the middle ages. How about rope belts, are they making a comeback too? Ok. I'll concede the hoodie has some utility for beach culture but in the office? C'mon.
mojo982 6y ago
I feel like I'm one of the few people who still likes flat designs. I hope it doesn't swing all the way back to full skeumorphism. YouTube looks way better than it did five years ago. What I do miss is efficient use of space. HackerNews still has a great design, it's really efficient with space. Old school iOS used space efficiently too, because it had to. It only had a 3.5" screen to work with. I miss that.
- sjwright 6y ago
  What I miss since iOS 7 is buttons that look like buttons. BUTTONS THAT LOOK LIKE BUTTONS. Is that too much to ask!?! Why are we stuck with sometimes plain blue text, especially when the use of that blue in UI "elements" isn't even consistent with regards to function or behaviour.
  - JoBrad 6y ago
    As a user, I like where flat design has taken us, generally. But I absolutely agree with you: the loss of “functionality hinting” (I’m sure there’s an actual term for this, but I don’t know what it is) is pretty bad. You can stumble around a design that isn’t in your language, if the cues are strong enough. But all-text directions throw that right out.
    - kd5bjo 6y ago
      > “functionality hinting” (I’m sure there’s an actual term for this, but I don’t know what it is) “Affordance” is the term you’re looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance#As_perceived_action_possibilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance#As_perceived_action...
      - aGHz 6y ago
        It seems the term is in fact "signifiers". From your link: > Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. We need both.
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cletus 6y ago
How about instead of "fun" we work on "fixing bugs" and "usability"? Just off the top of my head: - I miss the old copy and paste UI that Apple originally had on iOS. The magnifying glass worked so well. Now we have the "pure" design where you just drag the cursor. This is partially obscured by your finger and it can be so difficult to get that cursor between narrow letters (like "i" and "l", mainly because they're sans serif pretty much always). If you overshoot you can backspace and type in. If you go too far to the left you have to repeat the whole process. It's just dumb. - Face ID is so dumb, I miss Touch ID. I get you want to have the full front face for the screen. Do what Samsung did and put a sensor on the back. Apple argues there are too many false positives on Touch ID. I don't care about that. I do however care about all the false negatives on Face ID. - Let me control security. 5 failures of Face ID = a prompt for your PIN code. I don't want this but I can't change it. Because of all the false negatives I have to enter my PIN code way too often; - Swipe up is a terrible replacement to the Home button. Again, this is all in the name of screen real estate. I've heard it says that design is the art of compromise. What made the Macbook Air amazing was that it was the "correct" compromise. Fast forward to Johnny Ive's war on thickness and you have the disaster that was the 12" Macbook. That's what happen when you optimize for one thing only to the extreme. So for the edge-to-edge screen we have this swipe up nonsense. Why is it bad? Because which way you swipe depends on which way the app is oriented. Some don't change orientation with the phone so it's a side swipe "up". Some do but the trigger to change orientation fails for some reason. The gestures to get to app selection (with a weird swipe up and right) are strictly worse than a double press of the Home button; - I swear swiping for text entry continues to get worse. As one example, if you try and swipe something and get, say, "Rome" instead of "tome", you now have a capitalized word. Delete it and swipe in "tome" and it'll appear as "Tome" because obviously you meant to keep capitalization even though you never chose capitalization in the first place. - Often the keyboard will end up obscuring my messages, like iMessage fails to account for it being there so I have to dismiss it and open it again and it'll scroll up like it should've done. This bug has been around for months; - Flat design is stupid. The pendulum has swung too far from skeuomorphic design. The whole point of the old design was to give affordances to prompt user behaviour. The designers have gone insane and completely thrown out this key element of UI/UX design. So before we think about "fun" how about we first tick off "functional"?
treerunner 6y ago
Bringing back skeuomorphic ornamentation is not “fun.” Susan Kare’s original Mac icons, (bitmap icons, not that it matters), now those were fun!
gfodor 6y ago
I see literally no reason why this new aesthetic was not possible to introduce 7 years ago. The mindset was there, the tools, and the culture. It’s puzzling, and should be considered an epic failure imo.
risyachka 6y ago
Sometimes you don't need to overthink it - design changes are required every few years to make a product look fresh and new. Not because previous design was worse, or not usable, or new is better, or boring etc.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  The car industry has known this for years.
  - sidpatil 6y ago
    Automobile design has been heavily driven (pardon the pun) by two external factors: safety and emissions regulations. These serve a practical purpose/benefit to consumers.
fmajid 6y ago
Another benefit of that hack Jony Ive's departure, and yet more proof that he was worse than useless without the firm grip of Steve Jobs to guide him. And as to Ive, he cannot even claim to have originated flat design, it was a slavish imitation of Microsoft and Google's design.
- ericsoderstrom 6y ago
  Maybe I'm out of the loop. Why is Ive a "hack"?
EGreg 6y ago
Finally Apple has come to its senses! This flatness was like the touchbar. People forget but the reason this minimalist design travesty happened was political: Steve Jobs was no longer around, he had fired Scott Forstall because of the bungled Maps fiasco, and he promoted Jony Ive, the hardware minimalist who wanted to Bauhaus all the things. This is what I wrote in 2016, if Steve Jobs still ran Apple: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234 Look, we may not need skeumorphism, but we need shadows. We need to know what is part of the chrome interface and what’s part of the documents. When I was a kid I joined the Apple Human Interface developers usenet group (anyone remember those?) They used to be religiously against hidden modes (interface modes which could not be discovered and navigated to by straightforward visual inspection). Apple computers used to be easy to use for precisely guidelines like these, which they proudly published. Heck, they even proudly touted the small size of their phones for ease of access, which I agreed with: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Af0gtsjfy7E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Af0gtsjfy7E They became hypocrites and trend-followers when they abandoned all these things. Microsoft started the flat trend (and Woz praised them for it). Android phones became “phablets” (which Steve Jobs derided). Apple became a follower and didn’t even bother remembering what they claimed was the best way, just a year earlier. But then again, of course, Apple always did this even under Steve - claiming RISC processors were far better and next year claiming Intel was better after they switched. Claiming they invented the Omnibox in Safari years after Chrome did. But at least I am happy to see some of Apple’s original DNA coming back.
- majewsky 6y ago
  > This is what I wrote in 2016, if Steve Jobs still ran Apple: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234 You may want to install a spam filter on that comment section, or just disable it.
Pxtl 6y ago
I don't want visual design to be fun. I want it to be clean and consistent. I would gladly take something in 16 color EGA with Comic Sans as its main font if it would just stick to a rigid and clear design language. I don't think if buttons are flat or lickable or shiny or bezeled or oozing pus-filled nodules. As long as every button has the same styling as every other button and nothing that isn't clickable has that styling? I'm happy. Pick something and stick to it. And people who want "fun" designs can go work on their blog.
kps 6y ago
> They’re squircles alright I pulled out a ruler and they have flat sides, so — round rects are everywhere!
toron123 6y ago
Is it me or it looks like rip off of KDE.
BMorearty 6y ago
Hooray! I am so happy to see this. Like the author, I’ve been hoping for skeuomorphic design to return ever since it went out of vogue. I honestly didn’t expect it to happen. I thought Apple would go even farther away from it, eventually removing the beautiful shadow around each window. With Apple’s flat design, you can’t even tell that buttons are buttons. They just look like labels.
andybak 6y ago
There's a lot of middle ground between excessively flat and excessively skeuomorphic. I don't want cartoon pictures and faux-wood textures on everything. I just want things to look clickable.. Material design almost gets it right. A bit more visual distinction between interactable and non-interactable elements and I'd be happy.
kkarakk 6y ago
We're finally back on track to the cyberpunk "anything goes" vision i think is gonna be the final winner of the design wars. consumers don't give a shit about consistency. they want fun
simon_000666 6y ago
I’m not such a fan of all this Jony Ive bashing. It seems unfair to ascribe the whole minimal/flat design movement to him. I remember reading that in university he designed a pen with a part that was for ‘fiddling’ with in meetings, completely non functional other than to satisfy people so I somehow doubt he is the minimalist Puritan he is painted as in so many articles like this.
MintelIE 6y ago
Busy work for people who really shouldn't be in tech is what UI design has become. We had great UI, then tech branched out and we need to redo every UI continuously so the marketing people (who mostly also don't belong in tech) can boast of new and improved this and that. It's all so tiresome.
m12k 6y ago
The problem with the shift to flat design wasn't that it stopped being "fun", the problem was that there was a whole bunch of things being communicated to users by the previous, non-flat designs that got lost in the transition, and that flat design doesn't have a good alternative for: - Not using shadows and lines to separate panels, and using solid color blocking or whitespace instead is much more confining, design-wise, and greatly limits possible information density. Sure, all that whitespace looks great in presentations, but it's like the difference between a designer kitchen from a magazine and a place where I can actually cook. - Panels that are raised up or recessed using shading provide an obvious hierarchy, giving users valuable cues as to the relation of the elements. With shading and depth, it's obvious that items in this toolbar affect the items in this panel below it, one is subservient to the other. With color blocking, it's all just rectangles next to each other. - Buttons that are slightly raised up have an affordance for clicking, and there's no way in hell you can confuse them for a label - it's much easier to overlook that 'the label with blue text' is actually a button, while the label with black text is just a label. - Ostensibly, a flat design contains fewer distractions. But ironically, in reality, a human brain may have a much harder time understanding an interface when everything is flat and looks alike, than when elements have depth and distinctness to them. More information communicated does not always translate into more cognitive load in processing it - often the opposite is true. Sure, I understand the urge to rebel against skeomorphism (that faux-leather in the iOS Find my Friends app was an abomination) but they threw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm glad to see a lot of these changes being slowly walked back with successive versions of iOS - in the linked article the comparison between the "tabs" (segmented control) in iOS 12 and 13 really showcases how a shaded design can look both less distracting and convey more information than a dogmatically flat design.
marban 6y ago
Apple is not bringing back the fun — designers & web decorators didn't have the balls to push the barriers and surrendered to everything default with the advent of Web 2.0. Screen design has been desperate for an 80s moment since then.
ksec 6y ago
"Pendulum swings" , "Changes". Are these really the right word to use? Apple has always had some from of Skeuomorphic in their design since its early days. It was what Steve wanted it to be. Apple felt that flatness were wrong right after iOS 7 was released. An every year since then they have been "walking back" those "changes". Everything Ive changed all reverted back to Steve Jobs' era. Scott Forstall wouldn't have left. Their Head of UI wouldn't have left. Apple Store changed in design and layout, ( You could argued whether those are from Angela or Jony ) some of them are reverted back. Apple's Keyboard to literally no key travel, reverted back to 1mm but still very shallow to the old 1.5mm. A large part of Apple has spend a half a decade fixing their wrong directional changes. I really miss Steve Jobs.
- jsf01 6y ago
  What do you mean about the key travel on the keyboard? I’m not familiar with the term in this context.
  - ksec 6y ago
    The depth of Key press. The previous keys on Macbook are 1.5mm in depth, the distance it travel every time you press it, with roughly 60g of force. This has been sort of the golden standard in keyboard on Notebook ( and in many cases Desktop ) for more than a decade. Apple reduce that to 0.7mm in their infamous butterfly keyboard in the name of thinner devices. For some that might have been fine or even preferable. For many its typing experience is much worst. Due to its reliability problems ( which may not have anything to do with the lower key depth ) Apple walked back on the design and uses a 1 mm Key travel "Magic Keyboard". And from my experience it is pretty much the same as the old Butterfly keyboard in terms of Typing experience.
mdoms 6y ago
This makes perfect sense if you ignore the existence of every software vendor other than Apple.
lurquer 6y ago
The best design, of course,is and will always be LCARS. Regrettably, nobody knows how it works or which buttons do what... but it makes up for it with soothing beeps and clicks.
gridlockd 6y ago
I generally welcome this trend, but speech bubbles are not supposed to be three-dimensional shapes like that. It makes no sense whatsoever and it looks disturbing to me.
Animats 6y ago
This is too much like 1950s auto design. Tailfins for your phone! In 1955, the auto industry caught up with the pent-up demand from WWII. Suddenly, making cars wasn't enough. Now they had to convince people to replace their old car even though it still ran. That's when auto styling became exuberant. All the automakers had tailfins. Big tailfins. Peak tailfin was reached in the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado. Tailfins then shrank, until by 1965, they were completely gone. Tailfins are what you do when you have no clue how to improve the product. By 1955, car engines had enough power, automatic transmissions and power brakes worked, suspensions were smooth, and air conditioning was available. Getting from point A to point B comfortably was pretty much solved. Solutions to the hard problems in fuel economy, safety, reliability, and handling were not yet available for production cars. So chrome and tailfins dominated.
reaperducer 6y ago
There is still some "fun" left in macOS, but it's harder and harder to find. Three examples: Enlarge the network icon for a Windows, or unknown computer, and you'll see the monitor has a BSOD on it. Enlarge the icon for Mail and you'll see the postmark on the stamp reads, "Hello From California." Enlarge the icon for Pages, and there's a fun little travelogue. There used to be an Apple program that had the famous "Misfits" text on it. I thought it was TextEdit, but it doesn't seem to be there anymore.
tuatoru 6y ago
Nielsen Norman Group have been criticising flat design for a long time. One of the major criticisms is that over time they cause even experienced users to become hesitant and uncertain.[1] That right there should have been enough to squash flat design. [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design-long-exposure/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design-long-exposure/
coldtea 6y ago
The post, describing the new iOS 14/macOS icons: >Some of them depict physical objects in a style that can only really be called skeuomorphic No, this style cannot really be called skeuomorphic. You cannot have "skeuomorphic" icons. Neither etymologically or semantically. Skeuomorphic etymological comes from Greek for "appliance like". And semantically it's about GUIs (key distinction: GUIs, not icons or images) emulating real world objects. A movie player interface that looks like a real-world DVD player is a skeuomorphic UI. A movie player icon that looks like a TV set, or a Dick Utility icon with a hard drive and a pair stethoscope are not "skeuomorphic". They are merely life-like depictions. Same way, if an icon for my "Horse" app (say, a note taking app) is a realistically rendered horse, that's not "skeuomorphism". That's just an icon with a plain old "realism" painting/rendering of a horse.
musicale 6y ago
I like discoverability and generally appreciate Apple's unified visual design for macOS 11 and iOS 14. However, I will miss the distinct outline shapes and silhouettes which have made macOS icons easy to distinguish from each other since the original Mac (really earlier than that, going back to the Lisa and Xerox Alto.) Now everything's going to be an iPhone home-screen RoundRect. Consider these distinctive silhouettes of Super Smash Bros. fighters: https://www.sporcle.com/games/skuban/super-smash-bros-characters-by-silhouette https://www.sporcle.com/games/skuban/super-smash-bros-charac... Or the silhouettes from Apple's iconic iPod ads: https://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/ipod-silhouettes-2000-2011/ https://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/ipod-silhouettes-2000-2...

275 points by flowerlad 6y ago

here's a very interesting take here - about art deco being the design for the next few years https://vanschneider.com/art-deco-will-be-the-visual-language-of-2021 https://vanschneider.com/art-deco-will-be-the-visual-languag... However, I also believe that the Bauhaus way of using flat designs with interesting shapes and motion will be an interesting path forward

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Whatever you think of Art Deco - and personally I loathe it, but that's incidental - IMO it would be a tragic failure of imagination to try to reincarnate a design style that's already a century old. Likewise for Bauhaus design - also a century old. There are hints of a new generative aesthetic - busy in an unhierarchical repeated-elements kind of way, with organic influences - but that's better suited to architecture and sculpture than commercial design. There probably won't be a completely original design language until AR/VR become ubiquitous - which will take a while.
- sandGorgon 6y ago
  In a lot of ways, material design is Bauhaus.
majewsky 6y ago
I don't have any experience in art history or design, but judging by the photos in your article, you seem to be conjecturing that in 5-10 years, everything is going to look like a Wes Anderson film. :)

aimor 6y ago

"Pendulum swings" are going to shake off everyone else at different rates and we're going to be stuck with an eclectic mix of designs. This already plagues Windows (Ribbon, legacy settings) and Android (square, squircle, circle, triangle icons). I don't think people are able to distinguish between what's new and old anymore. Aesthetics will finally be free from corporate trend setting and maybe we'll feel comfortable doing our own thing.

dagmx 6y ago
The difference though is that on Windows you have to specifically choose visual styles to some degree. On Apple systems, as long as you’re using the native frameworks, the framework itself handles a lot more of the visual update. Both methods have their pros and cons, but you’re less likely to see an aesthetic divergence on iOS/macOS
x3haloed 6y ago
The pendulum swings are not the problem. They have been around forever. The problem, on Windows at least, is that they no longer take the time to finish their work, they don’t give developers standard frameworks to gracefully upgrade automatically to new schemes, and they change their minds so often with little warning to developers that devs don’t have time or patience to keep up. The difference with Apple is that they finish their work, and the pace of change is much slower.
kkarakk 6y ago
you forgot teardrop on android, which i use coz it's so hilariously bad but someone wanted it in so it got in. aka google PM syndrome

nathanaldensr 6y ago

Of course this author's happy--they're a designer. Meanwhile, everyone else has to absorb the burden of the "pendulum" ceaselessly swinging, retraining their brains yet again to absorb new visual memories and habits. There seems to be no such concept as "good enough."

Razengan 6y ago
I'm a user and I'm also happy. :) Change is fun. Being stuck with the same aesthetics for much longer than 5 years sounds like a special circle of Hell.
merrvk 6y ago
Keeps them in a job i guess
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
Programming is currently hating on OOP, in love with strong typing, and somewhere on the way from loving microservices to disowning ever to have spoken in their favor. Ten years ago, it was the opposite. So this particular quirk of thinking in groups doesn't seem to be confined to the design domain. Nor do "swings of pendulum" preclude the pendulum also having some forward momentum in sum. Think of it as a skier's waving, or a sailboat crossing against the wind, and the sideways motions is actually required for any forward motion to happen.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 8ytecoder 6y ago
  Some of the things you mentioned are pure aesthetics - and they change with time - forward and backward. Some others change with the advent of tools and other developments. Micro services are hard to do right and they have been hard. But people rushed into it. With better tools in the future that might change. Same with beginner/new projects embracing dynamic programming. It’s perfect for a new code add. It bites only later; when the enthusiasm has died off and you got to keep the codebase and tests up to date and things start slipping here and there. Go is a darling now because it’s constraining. It skipped passed the last three decades of advancement in languages like they never happened. And then as it becomes way more popular people will ask for the same set of features that other languages have had forever.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

I wonder if Apple will ever let people install app icon libraries to change the appearance of default apps. That would be fun (at least I remember having fun as a kid doing that on Windows 95).

xoa 6y ago
AFAIK (haven't kicked the wheels on macOS 11 beta yet) you can still manually change all the default icons? I do anyway, I always hated Apple's new ones and found a perfect set I liked instead. All default system icons are still just icns bundles at /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources And could always just be swapped with whatever you want. With the advent of SIP it's now somewhat more involved since SIP needs to be turned off, icons changed, then back on, or else a specific exclusion done just for that directory. So it's harder now to just have an application or scripts to manage it all automatically and make it trivial to swap sets around at will. But if you're just interested in changing things once in a while (or merely after system updates) it's not a huge lift even now. And applications themselves as well as disk icons, specific folders and so on can all have their icons changed same as always.
- sirn 6y ago
  Not sure if it's possible for default apps (I don't have a Mac right now), but can't you just open a Get Item dialog, drag & drop an alternative icon onto the icon displayed in the dialog to replace it? (& click the icon, press delete to restore)
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Remember that app in the 1990s that allowed heavy-duty customization of the OS? Was it called Kaleidoscope? Can't remember. I know that it could do things like apply a "steampunk" theme, where all the scrollbars turned into brass poles, with green leather handles for the thumb button. Some of the themes were vomit-inducing (most of them, actually), but it did have a couple of great ones.
- compressedgas 6y ago

caiobegotti 6y ago

This kind of design ban lift is very welcome, as it brings a freshness to things again (speaking as an user specifically), but I sincerely hope this doesn't become a short-time cycle thing with Apple dictating the new UI motif of the next 5 years only to change it back and then back again and back. My memory of the change from skeuomorphism to a more flat colorful design is that it was rather abrupt across UIs everywhere in the industry, not to say a bit "traumatic" to some people probably.

kkarakk 6y ago
well it didn't shift coz of apple alone, they're just the largest visible adopters. as someone said in this thread, skeumorphism started looking really strange and is tough to do on high rez screens and varying form factor screens

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

vffhfhf 6y ago

What if we could give complete control of visuals to user? I use kde nowadays and the amount of customization is awesome. I am using chrome OS theme with tela icon pack and a cool ass animated mouse pack. And its frankly awesome. I feel like Apple is stagnating.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
I kinda like the ability to customize the Linux desktop. But in practice, I always end up with some major problems and many edge cases where my choices just don't work. A recent example was some web view showing a change log that respected the font color settings but not the background, resulting in white-on-white text with my dark UI. I'm probably far more willing to spend time on such issues. But I never got to a place where I felt I was "done". In that sense, Linux only demonstrates the difficulty of UI choices, and how it may not be possible to leave it to users. Hell, it's not even possible, apparently, to leave to application developers, judging by the state of the non-customized Linux desktop. Design may be a creative endeavour that requires a competent dictator, and cannot be done in the bazaar-model of OSS. (That, of course, is on top of the rather large number of flaws of any given Linux UI. Seriously: after reading much praise and endless criticism of MacOS here on HN, I gave (K)Ubuntu another shot. And the only possible conclusion is that Apple and Linux are measured on widely different scales.)
- shaan7 6y ago
  > And the only possible conclusion is that Apple and Linux are measured on widely different scales.) +1 They are simply designed for different end users - and that is fine. I used macOS for ~5 years before getting fed up with the limited window management - but I understand why it is that way - most people don't care. So people who do, can just use KDE et al, peace.
paulcole 6y ago
> What if we could give complete control of visuals to user? This would be a terrible idea. People complain (in the comments on this very page) that Apple’s professional designers do a terrible job. You think my uncle is going to do better?

caiobegotti 6y ago

In case HN is bringing it down (as it seems to be the case now): https://web.archive.org/web/20200705130437/https://applypixels.com/blog/comeback https://web.archive.org/web/20200705130437/https://applypixe...

jrockway 6y ago
What's weird is that it fails at SSL protocol negotiation; Chrome says it can't agree on a SSL version or cipher. This is weird because the cert is issued by CloudFlare, who probably shouldn't fail TLS negotiation just because the backend is unresponsive. Very strange.
- majewsky 6y ago
  On Firefox, I get SEC_ERROR_OCSP_UNAUTHORIZED_REQUEST, so there may be a problem with CloudFlare's OCSP server (?!?). But this is because I manually set security.ocsp.require = true in about:config. When I reset that to false, the page opens fine.

mekster 6y ago

Thank god the designs are being reconsidered from cheap flat looks but they now kind of look like toys with rounded corners for everything and are all square instead of having their own sizes. I'd still take iOS 6 design any day for iOS. Snow Leopard and iOS6 were their OS' peak.

throw_m239339 6y ago
> Thank god the designs are being reconsidered from cheap flat looks but they now kind of look like toys with rounded corners for everything and are all square instead of having their own sizes. All that hype around "flat" was just that, hype. Design needs texture and depth, these are just core concepts of design. Doing away with texture or depth because somebody in the silicon valley decided it was outdated means that all these designers that jumped into the "flat bandwagon" didn't even understand what their job was about: not following trends but ACTUALLY designing for a public.
harrygeez 6y ago
I agree with you on macOS but I also like the current design. It's not that big of a departure and it looks modern without sacrificing anything. Can't say the same about Big Sur though... I used to feel the same about iOS but if you search screenshots of it now at least to me it really didn't stand the test of time.

alxlaz 6y ago

I don't really care about "fun", but I just can't find the words to explain how happy I am that there's a chance we might put all this flat madness behind us. I'm looking forward to: * Not having this conversation with my mom (who, at 60+, is remarkably adept with computers but hey, we all run into trouble sometimes) over the phone anymore: Me: Okay mom, now press the "Edit" button Mom: Which one's the edit button? Me: Uh, the... um, it's the one that kindda looks like... a bunch of lines in a rectangle, I guess? Mom: Alex they all look like lines in a rectangle * Not hovering everything for five minutes until I can figure out what I can click and what I can't click (for bonus points: not trying to click something for five minutes like an idiot, only to find out it's a label, not a disabled button) * Buttons, tree views, tabs and all that having relief borders again, not necessarily because I like that, but because without it, the only way to "isolate" the information in them is using whitespace, and seven years of flat design hell later I can fit only slightly more content on my 1920x1080 screen than I could fit my Amiga's 1024x768 screen 20+ years ago. * Being able to tell file types apart from each other when I'm browsing at minimum zoom level -- which is how you end up browsing any collection of more than a few dozen items or so * Being able to tell application icons apart based on what's in the icons, not based on colours. People keep parroting this idea that "symbolic icons are easily to tell apart from each other because they're so simple" but when all icons are a letter or some anonymous symbol on a blob of colour, they all look the same when you put a few dozen of them next to each other. Maybe they're easy to tell apart when you have like four 128x128px icons but when you have 40 of them in a tiny dock at the bottom of your screen, the only useful information they retain is what colour they are.

artsyca 6y ago
You've certainly given this a lot of careful consideration. Edit! First off I appreciate the hate keep it coming. Secondly it's like this dude had this list in his back pocket just waiting for this post to show up so he could get it off his chest. Now back to your regularly scheduled death march
- ubercow13 6y ago
  >You've certainly given this a lot of careful consideration A hallmark of a good comment, you could say.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Anyone remember Kai's Power Tools? Now that was an interesting UI. https://www.mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html?utm_source=designernews https://www.mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html?utm_sourc...

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Does anyone know what happened to Kai Krause? Last I heard he was working on Something Interesting, and then silence.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  He's still around. He did help design a pretty cool fractal explorer app for the iPad (I have it). http://sub.blue/frax http://sub.blue/frax
- weinzierl 6y ago
  He lives in Germany in the 1000 year old castle he bought in 1999 from the money he made from his ownership in the companies HSC, MetaTools and MetaCreations. The castle was not in the best state back then and was restored by Kai. Here is an aerial photo of the castle from 2009[1]. I lies on the Middle Rhine, a very beautiful area. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Burg_Rheineck_Luftbild_03.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Burg_Rhe...
  - ImprobableTruth 6y ago
    oh man, I didn't even know it was possible to just buy a castle. That's crazy cool
    - majewsky 6y ago
      They can be bought and sold like any other realty. Some are owned by the state (esp. those used as public museums) and not up for sale, though.

rvz 6y ago

Apple: We now have an all new redesign for macOS 11... Designers: Apple's done it again, Time to adopt neomorphism in our apps and the web, like we did with flat design and skeuomorphism. Me: About this battery...[0] [0] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/23/macos-big-sur-battery-history-and-estimates/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/23/macos-big-sur-battery-h...

searchableguy 6y ago
They went too far on that one. Do designers consider how expensive the gpu rendering is for skeumomorphism or neuromorphism?
- quenix 6y ago
  What? It is? Forgive my ignorance, but isn't it just bitmap rendering? E.g. rending a flat icon should take approx the same GPU toll as a skeumorphic icon
  - jayd16 6y ago
    Flat design lets you make smaller 9 slices I guess. Smaller textures take up less ram but even that's a stretch.
    - _tw9j 6y ago
      I wasn't talking about icons alone in my second statement. :/ The design trend require soft shadows to be rendered on many elements in layers which I exaggeratedly pointed out. I apologise.
      - jayd16 6y ago
        Shadows lead to overdraw I suppose, but I don't believe most UI frameworks draw front to back anyway. They end up accelerating it by making large, multi-element bitmaps of the final render. It ends up being a very small cost.
6y ago

antidaily 6y ago

Yay for some depth to design. Nay for the overuse of drop shadows (especially on Messages icon).

kumarvvr 6y ago

As with all visual systems, too much minimalism and too much noise spoil the experience. Ultimately, the context matters a lot. Not to mention the app, target users, complexity of the app, and what not. But I really hated those flat, borderless 'buttons' in earlier iOS versions. That's just stupid design. It's minimal for sure, but functionally.

karaterobot 6y ago

People sometimes forget that the move to flat design was not entirely arbitrary and driven by fashion, it was driven by shifting technology and usage. Sure, fashion played a role, but in this case the main driver was the need to support devices of different resolutions. Scalability implies vectors, which implies shapes, fills, and strokes rather than bitmap assets. As a designer who made "skeuomorphic" interfaces before the shift, supporting even a couple of different device sizes with hundreds of different PNG slices had already gotten unsustainable by 2010, and moving to a vector-based workflow was a breath of fresh air. The pendulum did swing a little too far: some of the early human interface guidelines were wary of the concept of lighting (gradients and shadows). But, realistically, that was unworkable, and those guidelines changed because nobody followed them. "Flat design" as a moment was actually pretty short. Later iterations on the concepts explored during that moment, such as Material, were actually thoughtful and workable, in my opinion.

buboard 6y ago
The web already had solved that problem, even with bootstrap version 2. Surely apple provides primitives such as border-radius and gradients, which are enough to create an eye-catching button?
- baddox 6y ago
  The level of skeuomorphic design never really hit the web the same as it was on iOS before version 7. Remember the pool table green felt and wood trim of Game Center? That sort of thing is probably extremely expensive to design and maintain for the wide range of screens offered by Apple products.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
dehrmann 6y ago
> early human interface guidelines were wary of the concept of lighting Someone needs to go out and patent using multiple ambient light sensors to detect where light sources are relative to a screen, then shade skeuomorphic elements accordingly.

caymanjim 6y ago

I think Apple went overboard with minimalism, flatness, and lack of texture. Walking some of that back is good. Recent Apple designs lack sufficient visual cues to differentiate functions. Some things ought to pop in some way to draw attention. But "fun"? No thank you. All that cutesy crap they used to have was distracting. There was no consistency at all. Yellow lined paper as the notebook background? Winking emoji? UI elements that change size? A color palette chosen by a toddler on LSD? This new "fun" is an unwelcome reversion. Apple finally dropped their misguided cuteness in hardware design and ditched all the rounded corners and pastel colors. Are they going to undo that too?

huffmsa 6y ago
There's a difference between fun and kawaii. You don't like kawaii. Fun is just that, it's fun. It doesn't make you say awww, but it does tug at the corner of your mouth. It makes you want to use what your using and do it again. But it shouldn't come at the expense of experience or speed. Slow is rarely fun.
x3haloed 6y ago
> I think Apple went overboard with minimalism. I’ll agree with you there. They went to every possible length to completely remove anything skeuomorphic, which made it much more difficult to determine the function of UI elements. There were very few relatable curs from the real world and everyday experience to help. I believe that Google’s Material Design is the best at balancing “digital authenticity” with physical cues. And the chief insight is that lighting and surfaces are really important in everyday human experience for determining what things are and what they do. (And we determine what is a surface primarily based on lighting. It’s really all about lighting.) Material buttons, for example, look pressable, because they are raised, which you can infer based on the shadow they cast. But! They don’t look like a picture of a button from reality. That’s the difference. It’s not trying to perfectly emulate a button - it’s just trying to draw on subtle cues that humans use to identify buttons. > But “fun”? No thank you. That’s subjective. But in some cases I think you’re confusing fun with extreme skeuomorphism. The lined paper, for example, is so skeuomorphic, that it relies on making the entire application looking almost like a picture of a real pad of paper on your desk instead of using subtle cues to indicate the purpose of the application. The photorealistic objects in the new app icons, however, are not necessary for indicating the purpose of the app. They’re there because they’re rich, complex, and easy on the eyes - AKA “fun” - in the way that a painting is fun. You could easily draw stick figures to show what you mean, but a painting is rich with detail, color, and emotion. If you don’t want a sense of artistry in your desktop environment, you could use Linux with a lightweight desktop. Many of them are perfectly dry, sterile, and utilitarian. Most people, however, do have an aesthetic sense, and enjoy some kind of artistic touch. That’s why car sales are predominantly based on design aesthetic. > Apple finally dropped their misguided cuteness in hardware design and ditched all the rounded corners and pastel colors. Are they going to undo that too? I doubt it. There’s a difference between “fun” and “toyish” - what you call “cuteness.” I would argue that the physical aspects of Apple products are fun today without looking like toys. They used to look like toys. The bubbly appearance with pastel colors gave them a childish quality. New Apple hardware is a pleasure to behold, but not childish. I think that same intention is clear with the high-fidelity pen rendering in the new icon shown in the article. It’s not a crayon or a calligraphy pen. It looks like a Bauhaus design. It’s a utilitarian pen that an adult would use. It enriches and beautifies the icon without being toyish. The messages icon, on the other hand, was less expertly executed, I think. How do you add a sense of beauty and richness to a chat bubble? I would argue that you don’t. It’s too simple of a shape/object to try to do that with. It ends up looking like a balloon. They should rethink it. And the battery icon that everyone hates is obviously a mess. That needs to be rethought for sure. Everyone is too concerned with the pendulum swing. When a pendulum swings, it never moves all the way back to its starting point. In this case, Apple started with full-on skeuomorphism and swung completely in the opposite direction - completely devoid of any kind of physicality to their design. And now the pendulum is swinging back, but will not go back to total skeuomorphism. What we’re seeing now is a refinement. A better balance between the two philosophies. An understanding that physical cues are helpful without needing to make the whole UI look photorealistic. And and acknowledgment that playing with light and photorealism with restraint can be pleasing. I like this direction, even if there are a handful of missteps.

artsyca 6y ago

Let me be the only leperous pariah in this thread to mention that the same rationale can be applied to the way we dress, as a culture of design professionals and engineers. Because UI trends can come in and out of fashion but hoodies and T's are for life I get it. Any ex-military in this thread understand the importance of dressing up to pass muster?

kkarakk 6y ago
Except even hoodies are going in multiple directions fashion design wise. techwear,leisurewear,exercisewear(as seen in avengers infinity war) etc
- artsyca 6y ago
  Total bullshit. The hoodie went out with the tonsure in the middle ages. How about rope belts, are they making a comeback too? Ok. I'll concede the hoodie has some utility for beach culture but in the office? C'mon.

mojo982 6y ago

I feel like I'm one of the few people who still likes flat designs. I hope it doesn't swing all the way back to full skeumorphism. YouTube looks way better than it did five years ago. What I do miss is efficient use of space. HackerNews still has a great design, it's really efficient with space. Old school iOS used space efficiently too, because it had to. It only had a 3.5" screen to work with. I miss that.

sjwright 6y ago
What I miss since iOS 7 is buttons that look like buttons. BUTTONS THAT LOOK LIKE BUTTONS. Is that too much to ask!?! Why are we stuck with sometimes plain blue text, especially when the use of that blue in UI "elements" isn't even consistent with regards to function or behaviour.
- JoBrad 6y ago
  As a user, I like where flat design has taken us, generally. But I absolutely agree with you: the loss of “functionality hinting” (I’m sure there’s an actual term for this, but I don’t know what it is) is pretty bad. You can stumble around a design that isn’t in your language, if the cues are strong enough. But all-text directions throw that right out.
  - kd5bjo 6y ago
    > “functionality hinting” (I’m sure there’s an actual term for this, but I don’t know what it is) “Affordance” is the term you’re looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance#As_perceived_action_possibilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance#As_perceived_action...
    - aGHz 6y ago
      It seems the term is in fact "signifiers". From your link: > Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. We need both.

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cletus 6y ago

How about instead of "fun" we work on "fixing bugs" and "usability"? Just off the top of my head: - I miss the old copy and paste UI that Apple originally had on iOS. The magnifying glass worked so well. Now we have the "pure" design where you just drag the cursor. This is partially obscured by your finger and it can be so difficult to get that cursor between narrow letters (like "i" and "l", mainly because they're sans serif pretty much always). If you overshoot you can backspace and type in. If you go too far to the left you have to repeat the whole process. It's just dumb. - Face ID is so dumb, I miss Touch ID. I get you want to have the full front face for the screen. Do what Samsung did and put a sensor on the back. Apple argues there are too many false positives on Touch ID. I don't care about that. I do however care about all the false negatives on Face ID. - Let me control security. 5 failures of Face ID = a prompt for your PIN code. I don't want this but I can't change it. Because of all the false negatives I have to enter my PIN code way too often; - Swipe up is a terrible replacement to the Home button. Again, this is all in the name of screen real estate. I've heard it says that design is the art of compromise. What made the Macbook Air amazing was that it was the "correct" compromise. Fast forward to Johnny Ive's war on thickness and you have the disaster that was the 12" Macbook. That's what happen when you optimize for one thing only to the extreme. So for the edge-to-edge screen we have this swipe up nonsense. Why is it bad? Because which way you swipe depends on which way the app is oriented. Some don't change orientation with the phone so it's a side swipe "up". Some do but the trigger to change orientation fails for some reason. The gestures to get to app selection (with a weird swipe up and right) are strictly worse than a double press of the Home button; - I swear swiping for text entry continues to get worse. As one example, if you try and swipe something and get, say, "Rome" instead of "tome", you now have a capitalized word. Delete it and swipe in "tome" and it'll appear as "Tome" because obviously you meant to keep capitalization even though you never chose capitalization in the first place. - Often the keyboard will end up obscuring my messages, like iMessage fails to account for it being there so I have to dismiss it and open it again and it'll scroll up like it should've done. This bug has been around for months; - Flat design is stupid. The pendulum has swung too far from skeuomorphic design. The whole point of the old design was to give affordances to prompt user behaviour. The designers have gone insane and completely thrown out this key element of UI/UX design. So before we think about "fun" how about we first tick off "functional"?

treerunner 6y ago

Bringing back skeuomorphic ornamentation is not “fun.” Susan Kare’s original Mac icons, (bitmap icons, not that it matters), now those were fun!

gfodor 6y ago

I see literally no reason why this new aesthetic was not possible to introduce 7 years ago. The mindset was there, the tools, and the culture. It’s puzzling, and should be considered an epic failure imo.

risyachka 6y ago

Sometimes you don't need to overthink it - design changes are required every few years to make a product look fresh and new. Not because previous design was worse, or not usable, or new is better, or boring etc.

dehrmann 6y ago
The car industry has known this for years.
- sidpatil 6y ago
  Automobile design has been heavily driven (pardon the pun) by two external factors: safety and emissions regulations. These serve a practical purpose/benefit to consumers.

fmajid 6y ago

Another benefit of that hack Jony Ive's departure, and yet more proof that he was worse than useless without the firm grip of Steve Jobs to guide him. And as to Ive, he cannot even claim to have originated flat design, it was a slavish imitation of Microsoft and Google's design.

ericsoderstrom 6y ago
Maybe I'm out of the loop. Why is Ive a "hack"?

EGreg 6y ago

Finally Apple has come to its senses! This flatness was like the touchbar. People forget but the reason this minimalist design travesty happened was political: Steve Jobs was no longer around, he had fired Scott Forstall because of the bungled Maps fiasco, and he promoted Jony Ive, the hardware minimalist who wanted to Bauhaus all the things. This is what I wrote in 2016, if Steve Jobs still ran Apple: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234 Look, we may not need skeumorphism, but we need shadows. We need to know what is part of the chrome interface and what’s part of the documents. When I was a kid I joined the Apple Human Interface developers usenet group (anyone remember those?) They used to be religiously against hidden modes (interface modes which could not be discovered and navigated to by straightforward visual inspection). Apple computers used to be easy to use for precisely guidelines like these, which they proudly published. Heck, they even proudly touted the small size of their phones for ease of access, which I agreed with: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Af0gtsjfy7E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Af0gtsjfy7E They became hypocrites and trend-followers when they abandoned all these things. Microsoft started the flat trend (and Woz praised them for it). Android phones became “phablets” (which Steve Jobs derided). Apple became a follower and didn’t even bother remembering what they claimed was the best way, just a year earlier. But then again, of course, Apple always did this even under Steve - claiming RISC processors were far better and next year claiming Intel was better after they switched. Claiming they invented the Omnibox in Safari years after Chrome did. But at least I am happy to see some of Apple’s original DNA coming back.

majewsky 6y ago
> This is what I wrote in 2016, if Steve Jobs still ran Apple: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234 You may want to install a spam filter on that comment section, or just disable it.

Pxtl 6y ago

I don't want visual design to be fun. I want it to be clean and consistent. I would gladly take something in 16 color EGA with Comic Sans as its main font if it would just stick to a rigid and clear design language. I don't think if buttons are flat or lickable or shiny or bezeled or oozing pus-filled nodules. As long as every button has the same styling as every other button and nothing that isn't clickable has that styling? I'm happy. Pick something and stick to it. And people who want "fun" designs can go work on their blog.

kps 6y ago

> They’re squircles alright I pulled out a ruler and they have flat sides, so — round rects are everywhere!

toron123 6y ago

Is it me or it looks like rip off of KDE.

BMorearty 6y ago

Hooray! I am so happy to see this. Like the author, I’ve been hoping for skeuomorphic design to return ever since it went out of vogue. I honestly didn’t expect it to happen. I thought Apple would go even farther away from it, eventually removing the beautiful shadow around each window. With Apple’s flat design, you can’t even tell that buttons are buttons. They just look like labels.

andybak 6y ago

There's a lot of middle ground between excessively flat and excessively skeuomorphic. I don't want cartoon pictures and faux-wood textures on everything. I just want things to look clickable.. Material design almost gets it right. A bit more visual distinction between interactable and non-interactable elements and I'd be happy.

kkarakk 6y ago

We're finally back on track to the cyberpunk "anything goes" vision i think is gonna be the final winner of the design wars. consumers don't give a shit about consistency. they want fun

simon_000666 6y ago

I’m not such a fan of all this Jony Ive bashing. It seems unfair to ascribe the whole minimal/flat design movement to him. I remember reading that in university he designed a pen with a part that was for ‘fiddling’ with in meetings, completely non functional other than to satisfy people so I somehow doubt he is the minimalist Puritan he is painted as in so many articles like this.

MintelIE 6y ago

Busy work for people who really shouldn't be in tech is what UI design has become. We had great UI, then tech branched out and we need to redo every UI continuously so the marketing people (who mostly also don't belong in tech) can boast of new and improved this and that. It's all so tiresome.

m12k 6y ago

The problem with the shift to flat design wasn't that it stopped being "fun", the problem was that there was a whole bunch of things being communicated to users by the previous, non-flat designs that got lost in the transition, and that flat design doesn't have a good alternative for: - Not using shadows and lines to separate panels, and using solid color blocking or whitespace instead is much more confining, design-wise, and greatly limits possible information density. Sure, all that whitespace looks great in presentations, but it's like the difference between a designer kitchen from a magazine and a place where I can actually cook. - Panels that are raised up or recessed using shading provide an obvious hierarchy, giving users valuable cues as to the relation of the elements. With shading and depth, it's obvious that items in this toolbar affect the items in this panel below it, one is subservient to the other. With color blocking, it's all just rectangles next to each other. - Buttons that are slightly raised up have an affordance for clicking, and there's no way in hell you can confuse them for a label - it's much easier to overlook that 'the label with blue text' is actually a button, while the label with black text is just a label. - Ostensibly, a flat design contains fewer distractions. But ironically, in reality, a human brain may have a much harder time understanding an interface when everything is flat and looks alike, than when elements have depth and distinctness to them. More information communicated does not always translate into more cognitive load in processing it - often the opposite is true. Sure, I understand the urge to rebel against skeomorphism (that faux-leather in the iOS Find my Friends app was an abomination) but they threw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm glad to see a lot of these changes being slowly walked back with successive versions of iOS - in the linked article the comparison between the "tabs" (segmented control) in iOS 12 and 13 really showcases how a shaded design can look both less distracting and convey more information than a dogmatically flat design.

marban 6y ago

Apple is not bringing back the fun — designers & web decorators didn't have the balls to push the barriers and surrendered to everything default with the advent of Web 2.0. Screen design has been desperate for an 80s moment since then.

ksec 6y ago

"Pendulum swings" , "Changes". Are these really the right word to use? Apple has always had some from of Skeuomorphic in their design since its early days. It was what Steve wanted it to be. Apple felt that flatness were wrong right after iOS 7 was released. An every year since then they have been "walking back" those "changes". Everything Ive changed all reverted back to Steve Jobs' era. Scott Forstall wouldn't have left. Their Head of UI wouldn't have left. Apple Store changed in design and layout, ( You could argued whether those are from Angela or Jony ) some of them are reverted back. Apple's Keyboard to literally no key travel, reverted back to 1mm but still very shallow to the old 1.5mm. A large part of Apple has spend a half a decade fixing their wrong directional changes. I really miss Steve Jobs.

jsf01 6y ago
What do you mean about the key travel on the keyboard? I’m not familiar with the term in this context.
- ksec 6y ago
  The depth of Key press. The previous keys on Macbook are 1.5mm in depth, the distance it travel every time you press it, with roughly 60g of force. This has been sort of the golden standard in keyboard on Notebook ( and in many cases Desktop ) for more than a decade. Apple reduce that to 0.7mm in their infamous butterfly keyboard in the name of thinner devices. For some that might have been fine or even preferable. For many its typing experience is much worst. Due to its reliability problems ( which may not have anything to do with the lower key depth ) Apple walked back on the design and uses a 1 mm Key travel "Magic Keyboard". And from my experience it is pretty much the same as the old Butterfly keyboard in terms of Typing experience.

mdoms 6y ago

This makes perfect sense if you ignore the existence of every software vendor other than Apple.

lurquer 6y ago

The best design, of course,is and will always be LCARS. Regrettably, nobody knows how it works or which buttons do what... but it makes up for it with soothing beeps and clicks.

gridlockd 6y ago

I generally welcome this trend, but speech bubbles are not supposed to be three-dimensional shapes like that. It makes no sense whatsoever and it looks disturbing to me.

Animats 6y ago

This is too much like 1950s auto design. Tailfins for your phone! In 1955, the auto industry caught up with the pent-up demand from WWII. Suddenly, making cars wasn't enough. Now they had to convince people to replace their old car even though it still ran. That's when auto styling became exuberant. All the automakers had tailfins. Big tailfins. Peak tailfin was reached in the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado. Tailfins then shrank, until by 1965, they were completely gone. Tailfins are what you do when you have no clue how to improve the product. By 1955, car engines had enough power, automatic transmissions and power brakes worked, suspensions were smooth, and air conditioning was available. Getting from point A to point B comfortably was pretty much solved. Solutions to the hard problems in fuel economy, safety, reliability, and handling were not yet available for production cars. So chrome and tailfins dominated.

reaperducer 6y ago

There is still some "fun" left in macOS, but it's harder and harder to find. Three examples: Enlarge the network icon for a Windows, or unknown computer, and you'll see the monitor has a BSOD on it. Enlarge the icon for Mail and you'll see the postmark on the stamp reads, "Hello From California." Enlarge the icon for Pages, and there's a fun little travelogue. There used to be an Apple program that had the famous "Misfits" text on it. I thought it was TextEdit, but it doesn't seem to be there anymore.

tuatoru 6y ago

Nielsen Norman Group have been criticising flat design for a long time. One of the major criticisms is that over time they cause even experienced users to become hesitant and uncertain.[1] That right there should have been enough to squash flat design. [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design-long-exposure/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design-long-exposure/

coldtea 6y ago

The post, describing the new iOS 14/macOS icons: >Some of them depict physical objects in a style that can only really be called skeuomorphic No, this style cannot really be called skeuomorphic. You cannot have "skeuomorphic" icons. Neither etymologically or semantically. Skeuomorphic etymological comes from Greek for "appliance like". And semantically it's about GUIs (key distinction: GUIs, not icons or images) emulating real world objects. A movie player interface that looks like a real-world DVD player is a skeuomorphic UI. A movie player icon that looks like a TV set, or a Dick Utility icon with a hard drive and a pair stethoscope are not "skeuomorphic". They are merely life-like depictions. Same way, if an icon for my "Horse" app (say, a note taking app) is a realistically rendered horse, that's not "skeuomorphism". That's just an icon with a plain old "realism" painting/rendering of a horse.

musicale 6y ago

I like discoverability and generally appreciate Apple's unified visual design for macOS 11 and iOS 14. However, I will miss the distinct outline shapes and silhouettes which have made macOS icons easy to distinguish from each other since the original Mac (really earlier than that, going back to the Lisa and Xerox Alto.) Now everything's going to be an iPhone home-screen RoundRect. Consider these distinctive silhouettes of Super Smash Bros. fighters: https://www.sporcle.com/games/skuban/super-smash-bros-characters-by-silhouette https://www.sporcle.com/games/skuban/super-smash-bros-charac... Or the silhouettes from Apple's iconic iPod ads: https://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/ipod-silhouettes-2000-2011/ https://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/ipod-silhouettes-2000-2...