8 ms·

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

by 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.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  Your edit shows that your original post was as ill-meaning and vague as they thought, which is why it was downvoted.
  - artsyca 6y ago
    The original comment was just the first sentence, I felt like it spoke for itself but apparently the hive was of a different opinion. I utterly hate this place it's like a stalinist gulag.
    - unethical_ban 6y ago
      It's possible your first sentence was not sarcastic or insulting, but it kind of came off that way. Then your edit made it clear you were throwing shade at the person for having their rant in their head. Dude, several people gave you feedback on why you got downvoted. I have now spent... at least four minutes of my life dedicated to helping an internet stranger understand why their comment seemed rash. And you're complaining about "Stalinist Gulag"? Get over yourself, stop being melodramatic, or go read about the torture and starvation of millions of people while you sit drinking tea and typing out armchair philosophy on your mechanical keyboard.
      - artsyca 6y ago
        I'm on my iPhone but you have a point we've become so meta sarcastic that in all honesty I meant 'kudos for itemizing all your grievances so clearly and succinctly' and it came off as condescending. I always wonder, do people read messages in their own voice or the voice of the writer? It helps to have at least a measure of compassion. Good of you to invest a few minutes of your day on clarifying that. I mean it with no hint of sarcasm but I can see if someone were struggling with a tough turd while reading it, it may come across much differently. Edit: and by the way, all Stalinist gulags start with a petty quasi meritocratic bureaucracy and people just following orders and doing their assigned tasks. Edit 2: the OP understood my meaning, I was referring to the barrage of downvotes. This past few days I've hit a great streak.
gambiting 6y ago
100% with you. I absolutely hate the material design, it's the least intuitive way to use a computer. Paired with touch-first interfaces it's one of the worst thing to happen to computers.
- dagmx 6y ago
  The original material design spec was a lot more layered than what it’s turned into.
- harrygeez 6y ago
  Not saying material design is great, but it's a great step up from Holo UI and anything before that in Android. I just dislike that it became so ubiquitous now and it's a train wreck on desktop
  - Lammy 6y ago
    Personally I went through the opposite process. I was a huge fan of Android up to and including KitKat, and I thought Holo was great. My enthusiasm for the entire platform disappeared as soon as Lollipop came out with the dreadful new Material UI. Even with themes I just hated using it on every level and eventually switched to an iPhone.
    - harrygeez 6y ago
      Material UI and iOS both look more similar than ever. I'm not sure if aesthetic would be the reason to go for an iPhone
      - Lammy 6y ago
        It was a lot of things around that release. The look, the feel of the "cards" everywhere, the deprecation of power-user features in the name of security (like full SD card read/write access for apps). Totally the right trade for a dumbed-down-but-safe mass-market OS, but that's not why I liked Android. When presented a wannabe iPhone I prefer the real thing :p
HeckFeck 6y ago
You've hit the nail perfectly with most of those points. For all its faults, the older styles of UI and icons made better use of screen space and conveyed much more information to the user. That should always have priority over a "designer" or "artist" imposing a "style" on the system. Any UI is meant to facilitate work, not create work in trying to understand whatever new trend. It's quite an uphill struggle, but I've managed to salvage some better UI work from the past on my present GNU/Linux desktop (my loathing for flat and padded knows no bounds). But I'd prefer it if the user at least had the option of a coloured, 3d-textured UI in modern applications. Life itself is 3D, we should once again embrace that on the screen.
- chefandy 6y ago
  Designer rant. I've been a computer user for 35 years, developer for 25 years (10 full-time professionally), *nix user for 20 years, and am currently in a degree program as a designer, and I've got to say that I disagree entirely. I think you're conflating your personal taste with functional design, and then again conflating functional design with styling and decoration. Interface design principles— as a subset of industrial design— have been theorized about, extensively tested, and refined for decades. Stylistic trends in visual representations of ideas in icons, etc. are much less clearcut. At least in good quality commercial software, I can assure you that a designer's primary concern is usability. Visual cohesion and hierarchy, the flow of the eye around the screen, determining what a user actually needs to see and interact with during a task, and moving unnecessary elements to different views are all valuable tools a designer has to make a program more usable. They aren't merely stylists imposing trendy visuals on otherwise entirely usable software, and are certainly not "artists." However, open-source interfaces are sometimes created by inexperienced enthusiasts or developers trying to "make it look nice" rather than experienced designers. Projects often don't impose the same quality control for interface design decisions as they do for code design decisions. That might lead some "artists" or "designers" to do things that designers (sans-quotes) should be doing. Designers should be more involved in open-source projects and open-source projects should court design contributions and stop downplaying the importance of good interface design. Most users simply don't share your tolerance (preference?) for visually crowded interfaces that aim to cram as many elements on a screen as you can possibly fit with little editing or regard for what users actually 'need' on a screen for a given task. Your citing old school Linux UIs as a high point in UI design is portrays a perspective that doesn't have a ton in common with a typical user.
asadkn 6y ago
The real problem isn't necessarily flat vs skeuomorphism - it's the representations that are not really representative to everyone. Try "Click that icon with the floppy disk to save." with a new user.
- awakeasleep 6y ago
  It's a visually distinct symbol that a child can quickly learn to recognize, and generalize to other contexts. You can do a lot worse.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  I'm actually genuinely curious if young people have an issue with the floppy disk icon. I feel like at this point it's meant "save" longer than it was actually physically in use.
  - lame-robot-hoax 6y ago
    For the first time, about two weeks ago, I told someone to click the blue floppy disk to save and they said “what’s a floppy disk?” I’m only in my mid twenties and that even made me almost say “what the hell did you just say?” out loud.
- alxlaz 6y ago
  > it's the representations that are not really representative to everyone. That's true of virtually every graphical representation in a computer application. Save icon? How about folders? Where I'm from, folders (the physical item) never took off. Even today, we use a sort of slimmed-down binder for small collections of documents. For millions of people, myself included, the folders in Windows 95 and Windows 98 were the first ones we ever saw. That never prevented anyone from learning how to use them, or figuring out what the "Open..." button does. So yeah, "Click the folder button to open" never worked, for the same reason -- no one had ever seen a folder. But the button was visually distinctive enough that you could say "click the yellow button in the toolbar, it's way up there on the left". Very few icons are really globally unambiguous (and I still think designers in the early/mid-'90s really had the right idea when they just put the frickin' text next to, or below the damn icon). But making all icons look basically the same makes an already difficult situation even worse.
Pxtl 6y ago
Honestly, I was actually excited by flat design when I first saw it, but that was on Windows Phone 7. And WP7 had an exceptionally rigid and consistent approach to flat design. If something was colored, it was a button. If you wanted to color something that wasn't a button? Too bad for you. Basically, on WP7 you didn't get to "design" at all - the UI framework basically said "this is what your widgets look like, if you don't like it you can make software for a different operating system. Ironically, I think "bringing back the fun" is what destroyed flat design, because people who wanted to make their designs "fun" destroyed the design-language. Overall, I don't care if you go flat or otherwise - I want the WP7 attitude in my software. The platform provides a rigid design-language, and the individual applications do not deviate from it. Unfortunately, web is fundamentally a platform designed for styled documents and not GUIs so we don't have that kind of standardization available, and the web is the center of modern design.
- lou1306 6y ago
  Windows Phone had amazing human interface guidelines for hand-held touch devices. I still believe that Live Tiles are unmatched as a home screen pattern. > The platform provides a rigid design-language, and the individual applications do not deviate from it The problem here is twofold: 1. Apps actually deviate a lot from the guidelines for their platform. A lot of posts from grumpy.website et al. concern apps (even first-party ones!), not just websites. For instance, title bars that are undraggable/hidden/used as toolbars are a worrying trend. 2. The design language itself may be flawed, so following it blindly would result in a worse UX. (See: Material design and its weird, obnoxious floating button)
- neididipp 6y ago
  Can’t wait for the flat design trend to return in 4-5 years after this light nudge towards flat + a little depth, leads us right back to yellow legal pads with faux leather binding, but all the elements look flatter. There’s precious little “new frontier” to chase for 2D screens design. Small touches like expanded drag, swipe, etc would be nice. Designing towards doing not fostering emotional attachment to design. The epistemology has come unhinged from its ontology for wankery of theory sake and here we are looking to escape it. It’s no longer serving the true purpose of the gadget, to do utilitarian work. We’re bored with flat and they need to keep us attached emotionally, so here’s our new season of designs! I’d prefer we return to utilitarian UI of Win2k, OS9, so I can get a job done and not want to be “in love” with a screen
dmitriid 6y ago
I agree with all your points. However, Big Sur is going to be very, very, very bad accessibility-wise. The entire interface is washed out. There's little to no distinction between selected items. Translucency breaks readability of text. And so on and so forth. Some examples: - https://twitter.com/krzyzanowskim/status/1275469783488696323 https://twitter.com/krzyzanowskim/status/1275469783488696323 - https://twitter.com/lunasorcery/status/1275237073625198592 https://twitter.com/lunasorcery/status/1275237073625198592 - https://twitter.com/Freerunnering/status/1275832747895009283 https://twitter.com/Freerunnering/status/1275832747895009283
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  One would think hundreds of thousands of dollars per year would buy people with a few critical thinking skills. The second example is unforgivable.
  - lioeters 6y ago
    Oof, that was painful. Not only is the low contrast bad for accessibility, the unbalanced X paddings are just wrong.. Something must be amiss in their QA if this was allowed to reach public release.
- jdhn 6y ago
  There's no way that second screenshot is WCAG 2.0 contrast compliant.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    I'm sure Apple's response is that you can turn on high contrast mode in accessibility settings. ...and my problem with that argument is that high contrast mode looks aesthetically terrible. So basically, only people with great eyesight get to appreciate aesthetically-pleasing UIs. Obviously, some people just have very bad eyesight, and there comes a point when you need to say "screw aesthetics, here's something you can actually see." But, the less people who need to resort to that, the better.
sriku 6y ago
I admit to the same feeling. I like akeuomorphism .. but as with most, we probably got carried away a bit. What I liked about the flat design era (not flat design itself) was the typography - you could suddenly use any typeface you wanted because displays were all retina! What I want is some kind of wabesabe design ethic that have the richness of texture and flavour (which is part of what the OP is referring to as "fun" I suppose). The digital world has been getting incredibly dull and monotonic these past several years.
- alxlaz 6y ago
  > you could suddenly use any typeface you wanted because displays were all retina You're thinking only of Apple land, right? Most displays in the world are still 1366x768 and 1920x1080, and huge fonts and widgets everywhere is exactly what I'm not going to miss about this era.
  - sriku 6y ago
    On mobile devices. My recent two (relatively) cheap ($200 range) phones have both been retina .. but yeah apple drove the retina evolution and typography benefited from that greatly I think .. on mobile devices.
on_and_off 6y ago
> Not hovering everything for five minutes until I can figure out what I can click I really like the way material addresses this : any clickable element should use the primary color of your app. This way, no guesswork. Button, switches, icons, links, they all use the same action color so if something uses it, you know it has to be clickable.
- fladd 6y ago
  Except that every app can have its own "primary" colour, so you have to learn as many rules as you have apps, instead of one if a button would just look like a button.
  - on_and_off 6y ago
    it is not exactly hard to spot what the primary color of an app is...
asjo 6y ago
> Amiga's 1024x768 screen What Amiga did you have?
- adrianmonk 6y ago
  Amiga 1200 with AGA chipset, maybe? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1200 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1200 : > 800×600i, 1024×768i (not officially supported)
- alxlaz 6y ago
  You could technically get 1024x768 (with really bad flickering) on anything with an AGA. Check out e.g. https://aminet.net/package/driver/moni/WBHacksAGA https://aminet.net/package/driver/moni/WBHacksAGA or https://aminet.net/package/driver/moni/HighGFX40_6 https://aminet.net/package/driver/moni/HighGFX40_6 . The only high-res Amiga I saw at the time was an Amiga 4000 (it wasn't mine, but I had pretty much unlimited access to one at $parental_unit's workplace, where they had some fancy multimedia lab that generally went unused), but I expect the Amiga 1200 could do it, too. The flickering was pretty terrible but I was a kid and I had good eyes :). HighGFX was actually popular (and useful) enough that it caused a bunch of "flickerfixer" hardware to sprout in the mid/late 90s but I've never used/seen one.
dehrmann 6y ago
> Buttons It's really hard explaining to my grandma what's tappable on her iPad when everything's not just flat, but buttons aren't even marked in a way that suggests you can interact with them.
- Animats 6y ago
  That's probably the biggest design flaw with many UIs - no visual distinction between what will accept touches/clicks and what won't.
gridlockd 6y ago
Anydesk for iOS is a thing, my days of explaining GUIs over the phone are over.

by alxlaz 6y ago

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.
unethical_ban 6y ago
Your edit shows that your original post was as ill-meaning and vague as they thought, which is why it was downvoted.
- artsyca 6y ago
  The original comment was just the first sentence, I felt like it spoke for itself but apparently the hive was of a different opinion. I utterly hate this place it's like a stalinist gulag.
  - unethical_ban 6y ago
    It's possible your first sentence was not sarcastic or insulting, but it kind of came off that way. Then your edit made it clear you were throwing shade at the person for having their rant in their head. Dude, several people gave you feedback on why you got downvoted. I have now spent... at least four minutes of my life dedicated to helping an internet stranger understand why their comment seemed rash. And you're complaining about "Stalinist Gulag"? Get over yourself, stop being melodramatic, or go read about the torture and starvation of millions of people while you sit drinking tea and typing out armchair philosophy on your mechanical keyboard.
    - artsyca 6y ago
      I'm on my iPhone but you have a point we've become so meta sarcastic that in all honesty I meant 'kudos for itemizing all your grievances so clearly and succinctly' and it came off as condescending. I always wonder, do people read messages in their own voice or the voice of the writer? It helps to have at least a measure of compassion. Good of you to invest a few minutes of your day on clarifying that. I mean it with no hint of sarcasm but I can see if someone were struggling with a tough turd while reading it, it may come across much differently. Edit: and by the way, all Stalinist gulags start with a petty quasi meritocratic bureaucracy and people just following orders and doing their assigned tasks. Edit 2: the OP understood my meaning, I was referring to the barrage of downvotes. This past few days I've hit a great streak.

gambiting 6y ago

100% with you. I absolutely hate the material design, it's the least intuitive way to use a computer. Paired with touch-first interfaces it's one of the worst thing to happen to computers.

dagmx 6y ago
The original material design spec was a lot more layered than what it’s turned into.
harrygeez 6y ago
Not saying material design is great, but it's a great step up from Holo UI and anything before that in Android. I just dislike that it became so ubiquitous now and it's a train wreck on desktop
- Lammy 6y ago
  Personally I went through the opposite process. I was a huge fan of Android up to and including KitKat, and I thought Holo was great. My enthusiasm for the entire platform disappeared as soon as Lollipop came out with the dreadful new Material UI. Even with themes I just hated using it on every level and eventually switched to an iPhone.
  - harrygeez 6y ago
    Material UI and iOS both look more similar than ever. I'm not sure if aesthetic would be the reason to go for an iPhone
    - Lammy 6y ago
      It was a lot of things around that release. The look, the feel of the "cards" everywhere, the deprecation of power-user features in the name of security (like full SD card read/write access for apps). Totally the right trade for a dumbed-down-but-safe mass-market OS, but that's not why I liked Android. When presented a wannabe iPhone I prefer the real thing :p

HeckFeck 6y ago

You've hit the nail perfectly with most of those points. For all its faults, the older styles of UI and icons made better use of screen space and conveyed much more information to the user. That should always have priority over a "designer" or "artist" imposing a "style" on the system. Any UI is meant to facilitate work, not create work in trying to understand whatever new trend. It's quite an uphill struggle, but I've managed to salvage some better UI work from the past on my present GNU/Linux desktop (my loathing for flat and padded knows no bounds). But I'd prefer it if the user at least had the option of a coloured, 3d-textured UI in modern applications. Life itself is 3D, we should once again embrace that on the screen.

chefandy 6y ago
Designer rant. I've been a computer user for 35 years, developer for 25 years (10 full-time professionally), *nix user for 20 years, and am currently in a degree program as a designer, and I've got to say that I disagree entirely. I think you're conflating your personal taste with functional design, and then again conflating functional design with styling and decoration. Interface design principles— as a subset of industrial design— have been theorized about, extensively tested, and refined for decades. Stylistic trends in visual representations of ideas in icons, etc. are much less clearcut. At least in good quality commercial software, I can assure you that a designer's primary concern is usability. Visual cohesion and hierarchy, the flow of the eye around the screen, determining what a user actually needs to see and interact with during a task, and moving unnecessary elements to different views are all valuable tools a designer has to make a program more usable. They aren't merely stylists imposing trendy visuals on otherwise entirely usable software, and are certainly not "artists." However, open-source interfaces are sometimes created by inexperienced enthusiasts or developers trying to "make it look nice" rather than experienced designers. Projects often don't impose the same quality control for interface design decisions as they do for code design decisions. That might lead some "artists" or "designers" to do things that designers (sans-quotes) should be doing. Designers should be more involved in open-source projects and open-source projects should court design contributions and stop downplaying the importance of good interface design. Most users simply don't share your tolerance (preference?) for visually crowded interfaces that aim to cram as many elements on a screen as you can possibly fit with little editing or regard for what users actually 'need' on a screen for a given task. Your citing old school Linux UIs as a high point in UI design is portrays a perspective that doesn't have a ton in common with a typical user.

asadkn 6y ago

The real problem isn't necessarily flat vs skeuomorphism - it's the representations that are not really representative to everyone. Try "Click that icon with the floppy disk to save." with a new user.

awakeasleep 6y ago
It's a visually distinct symbol that a child can quickly learn to recognize, and generalize to other contexts. You can do a lot worse.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I'm actually genuinely curious if young people have an issue with the floppy disk icon. I feel like at this point it's meant "save" longer than it was actually physically in use.
- lame-robot-hoax 6y ago
  For the first time, about two weeks ago, I told someone to click the blue floppy disk to save and they said “what’s a floppy disk?” I’m only in my mid twenties and that even made me almost say “what the hell did you just say?” out loud.
alxlaz 6y ago
> it's the representations that are not really representative to everyone. That's true of virtually every graphical representation in a computer application. Save icon? How about folders? Where I'm from, folders (the physical item) never took off. Even today, we use a sort of slimmed-down binder for small collections of documents. For millions of people, myself included, the folders in Windows 95 and Windows 98 were the first ones we ever saw. That never prevented anyone from learning how to use them, or figuring out what the "Open..." button does. So yeah, "Click the folder button to open" never worked, for the same reason -- no one had ever seen a folder. But the button was visually distinctive enough that you could say "click the yellow button in the toolbar, it's way up there on the left". Very few icons are really globally unambiguous (and I still think designers in the early/mid-'90s really had the right idea when they just put the frickin' text next to, or below the damn icon). But making all icons look basically the same makes an already difficult situation even worse.

Pxtl 6y ago

Honestly, I was actually excited by flat design when I first saw it, but that was on Windows Phone 7. And WP7 had an exceptionally rigid and consistent approach to flat design. If something was colored, it was a button. If you wanted to color something that wasn't a button? Too bad for you. Basically, on WP7 you didn't get to "design" at all - the UI framework basically said "this is what your widgets look like, if you don't like it you can make software for a different operating system. Ironically, I think "bringing back the fun" is what destroyed flat design, because people who wanted to make their designs "fun" destroyed the design-language. Overall, I don't care if you go flat or otherwise - I want the WP7 attitude in my software. The platform provides a rigid design-language, and the individual applications do not deviate from it. Unfortunately, web is fundamentally a platform designed for styled documents and not GUIs so we don't have that kind of standardization available, and the web is the center of modern design.

lou1306 6y ago
Windows Phone had amazing human interface guidelines for hand-held touch devices. I still believe that Live Tiles are unmatched as a home screen pattern. > The platform provides a rigid design-language, and the individual applications do not deviate from it The problem here is twofold: 1. Apps actually deviate a lot from the guidelines for their platform. A lot of posts from grumpy.website et al. concern apps (even first-party ones!), not just websites. For instance, title bars that are undraggable/hidden/used as toolbars are a worrying trend. 2. The design language itself may be flawed, so following it blindly would result in a worse UX. (See: Material design and its weird, obnoxious floating button)
neididipp 6y ago
Can’t wait for the flat design trend to return in 4-5 years after this light nudge towards flat + a little depth, leads us right back to yellow legal pads with faux leather binding, but all the elements look flatter. There’s precious little “new frontier” to chase for 2D screens design. Small touches like expanded drag, swipe, etc would be nice. Designing towards doing not fostering emotional attachment to design. The epistemology has come unhinged from its ontology for wankery of theory sake and here we are looking to escape it. It’s no longer serving the true purpose of the gadget, to do utilitarian work. We’re bored with flat and they need to keep us attached emotionally, so here’s our new season of designs! I’d prefer we return to utilitarian UI of Win2k, OS9, so I can get a job done and not want to be “in love” with a screen

dmitriid 6y ago

I agree with all your points. However, Big Sur is going to be very, very, very bad accessibility-wise. The entire interface is washed out. There's little to no distinction between selected items. Translucency breaks readability of text. And so on and so forth. Some examples: - https://twitter.com/krzyzanowskim/status/1275469783488696323 https://twitter.com/krzyzanowskim/status/1275469783488696323 - https://twitter.com/lunasorcery/status/1275237073625198592 https://twitter.com/lunasorcery/status/1275237073625198592 - https://twitter.com/Freerunnering/status/1275832747895009283 https://twitter.com/Freerunnering/status/1275832747895009283

lotsofpulp 6y ago
One would think hundreds of thousands of dollars per year would buy people with a few critical thinking skills. The second example is unforgivable.
- lioeters 6y ago
  Oof, that was painful. Not only is the low contrast bad for accessibility, the unbalanced X paddings are just wrong.. Something must be amiss in their QA if this was allowed to reach public release.
jdhn 6y ago
There's no way that second screenshot is WCAG 2.0 contrast compliant.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I'm sure Apple's response is that you can turn on high contrast mode in accessibility settings. ...and my problem with that argument is that high contrast mode looks aesthetically terrible. So basically, only people with great eyesight get to appreciate aesthetically-pleasing UIs. Obviously, some people just have very bad eyesight, and there comes a point when you need to say "screw aesthetics, here's something you can actually see." But, the less people who need to resort to that, the better.

sriku 6y ago

I admit to the same feeling. I like akeuomorphism .. but as with most, we probably got carried away a bit. What I liked about the flat design era (not flat design itself) was the typography - you could suddenly use any typeface you wanted because displays were all retina! What I want is some kind of wabesabe design ethic that have the richness of texture and flavour (which is part of what the OP is referring to as "fun" I suppose). The digital world has been getting incredibly dull and monotonic these past several years.

alxlaz 6y ago
> you could suddenly use any typeface you wanted because displays were all retina You're thinking only of Apple land, right? Most displays in the world are still 1366x768 and 1920x1080, and huge fonts and widgets everywhere is exactly what I'm not going to miss about this era.
- sriku 6y ago
  On mobile devices. My recent two (relatively) cheap ($200 range) phones have both been retina .. but yeah apple drove the retina evolution and typography benefited from that greatly I think .. on mobile devices.

on_and_off 6y ago

> Not hovering everything for five minutes until I can figure out what I can click I really like the way material addresses this : any clickable element should use the primary color of your app. This way, no guesswork. Button, switches, icons, links, they all use the same action color so if something uses it, you know it has to be clickable.

fladd 6y ago
Except that every app can have its own "primary" colour, so you have to learn as many rules as you have apps, instead of one if a button would just look like a button.
- on_and_off 6y ago
  it is not exactly hard to spot what the primary color of an app is...

asjo 6y ago

> Amiga's 1024x768 screen What Amiga did you have?

adrianmonk 6y ago
Amiga 1200 with AGA chipset, maybe? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1200 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1200 : > 800×600i, 1024×768i (not officially supported)
alxlaz 6y ago
You could technically get 1024x768 (with really bad flickering) on anything with an AGA. Check out e.g. https://aminet.net/package/driver/moni/WBHacksAGA https://aminet.net/package/driver/moni/WBHacksAGA or https://aminet.net/package/driver/moni/HighGFX40_6 https://aminet.net/package/driver/moni/HighGFX40_6 . The only high-res Amiga I saw at the time was an Amiga 4000 (it wasn't mine, but I had pretty much unlimited access to one at $parental_unit's workplace, where they had some fancy multimedia lab that generally went unused), but I expect the Amiga 1200 could do it, too. The flickering was pretty terrible but I was a kid and I had good eyes :). HighGFX was actually popular (and useful) enough that it caused a bunch of "flickerfixer" hardware to sprout in the mid/late 90s but I've never used/seen one.

dehrmann 6y ago

> Buttons It's really hard explaining to my grandma what's tappable on her iPad when everything's not just flat, but buttons aren't even marked in a way that suggests you can interact with them.

Animats 6y ago
That's probably the biggest design flaw with many UIs - no visual distinction between what will accept touches/clicks and what won't.

gridlockd 6y ago

Anydesk for iOS is a thing, my days of explaining GUIs over the phone are over.