5 ms·
> celebration of aesthetics Yes and no. Aesthetics are always going to be critical to the consumer experience of technology; the problem is that there are diff
by core-questions 6y ago
> celebration of aesthetics
Yes and no. Aesthetics are always going to be critical to the consumer experience of technology; the problem is that there are difference schools of aesthetics, and presently the high-status UX school is a minimalist one that values showing as little information as possible in order to look 'easy to understand' in screenshots and at-a-glance tours.
If Windows 2000 wasn't "aesthetic" then we wouldn't have Vaporwave, after all; look how that late-90s look is glorified now. There's no shortage of people (myself included) that will still defend it as being a pinnacle of sorts, though I'd point at NeXT as being the real high water mark.
I'd call that late 90s style Modern Desktopist, where the metaphor of being a 'desk' we may have seen in some 80s Classical Desktopist has been left behind and replaced with functional, well-designed UI widgets building on years of refinement. There was a reaction to this modernism, and it came first in the form of Late 2000s Skeuomorphist UI as on iOS and in many creative applications on desktops preceding it: the 90s style being seen as too corporate, too 'suit', we ended up with skinnable apps, and apps that mimic the real world (I'm thinking of Propellerhead Reason here as the king of these). What skeuomorphism added in terms of enjoyment was lost in terms of losing all of the expected conventions of normal desktop applications: drag-n-drop, multiple select, keyboard shortcut consistency, etc.
Skeuomorphism was rejected in favour of what some call "flat" or "material" design, first in the Microsoft Metro form emulating highway signs, and then in the Google form emulating... nothing. Developer laziness, perhaps? I call this Digital Brutalism, it's at once "function over form" but at the same time missing a great deal of the "function" that the previous era had. It's fundamentally a skeuomorphic UI evolved to lose the skin and to hide most of the controls.
We're honestly all just waiting for someone to come out with a drastically more efficient UI paradigm. There's still room to make a real difference with people who use a desktop from day to day....
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- ShroudedNight 6y agoTo the ether: Pardon my ignorance, but is there something obviously wrong about the parent comment? It comes across as reasonable to me, but seems to be fairing poorly in the opinions of others.
- core-questions 6y agoI post dumb things people don't like in other threads and usually they go into my comment page and downvote everything else I've said. Comes with the territory, doesn't bother me
- trilinearnz 6y agoVery interesting insights here - thank you. I think you could write an extended version of this post as a very engaging blog article (maybe with some example screenshots), if you were ever so inclined :)
- bscphil 6y ago> If Windows 2000 wasn't "aesthetic" then we wouldn't have Vaporwave, after all; look how that late-90s look is glorified now. Isn't vaporwave a self-consciously nostalgic aesthetic though? It's glorified because it captures a kind of ideal of human-computer interaction that wasn't recognized as such at the time. Personally I don't mind material design (which is not really the same as flat design). I'd just like to see a little less padding and fewer hidden UI elements.
- redwall_hp 6y agoI have to add that 90s design was highly skeuomorphic as well. Chiseled buttons everywhere, icons and interactivity metaphors like trash cans or "My Briefcase" in Windows land, or even fully metaphorical things like Microsoft Bob. Skeuomorphs, by their technical definition, are a core part of art and design that goes far deeper than just "photorealistic icons and extraneous textured backgrounds." The modern iOS calendar and phone dialer are natural skeuomorphs, since they're carrying forward a familiar mode of interaction. There isn't any real reason why a calendar has to be a grid of dates, but it certainly is a lot easier to think about it that way due to generations of familiarity.
- selfhoster11 6y ago90s buttons came with their own design language: - popped-out button: available to press - popped-out but greyed out - usable, but disabled in the current context - popped-in - currently has the mouse button depressed on it, but will not fire until you let go. in case of the taskbar, the current selected application (radio button) - flat/not 3D - not an interactive element, likely just a label Far beyond being skeumorphic in appearance, they also had a unique visual language that communicated the state of a control. The modern flat UI interfaces entirely gave up on this, and created a simplified experience that also glosses over many UX affordances that people would subconsciously pick up on if present.
- fullerenedream 6y agoYes! This is one of my biggest gripes with modern flat UI's. What's that thing? Is it a button? I'll just have to hover over it to see... and hope the developer didn't forget to implement a hover state to show me whether this element is interactive.