The thing I most appreciated about skeuomorphism was that it had a high skill ceiling. A mediocre graphic artist's designs could be ugly, and often were, but a

The thing I most appreciated about skeuomorphism was that it had a high skill ceiling. A mediocre graphic artist's designs could be ugly, and often were, but a good graphic artist's designs could be positively delightful. The Mac OS X green glowing battery and metallic hard disk come to mind. Aqua had a good run before it overstayed its welcome. I'll gladly put up with a few bad designs if it means that I actually have something to look forward to now and again. I live for the pleasant surprise. Minimalism was a godsend for bad artists, but the flip side of that coin is that none of it is ever particularly good, either. It's one big sea of shrug, and to my taste that's worse than diamonds-and-dirt. But to each their own. I'll grant you that skeuomorphism as a constraint on functionality was a consistently bad idea, but I'd argue that minimalism as a constraint on functionality is consistently even worse. Apps either Just Work or Just Don't. I've been on the "lol screw you, user" side of this many times, but I used to write it off as just the new incarnation of poor error reporting until the day I was working on a wireless product and my assigned UX guy hid my "Connection Failed" message behind an indefinite spinner. Not one that only popped up when the connection failed, mind you. The only way to tell if configuration was happening or if it was stalled from a failed connection was to know how long it was supposed to take and kill it if it took too long. What if you didn't have this knowledge, but would otherwise be capable of diagnosing a connection issue if you had a hint that the connection was the problem ? Too bad, so sad. Just Doesn't Work. Ugh.