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I actually suspect that private companies love minimalism because it's cheap. Consider icons, for example - it's faster to create a gray outline than a nice, co

• candiodari 6y ago
  Exactly. If you were to take one of Europe's cathedrals, you can spend 10 years looking at decorations and statues and still discover new things, scenes and details. Every last little detail is thought out, and contributes to the whole of the effect. They also generally took a fraction of the resources of an entire city for 2-8 centuries to build.
  • js8 6y ago
    > They also generally took a fraction of the resources of an entire city for 2-8 centuries to build. I think this is an interesting point. The cathedrals were built to last, which lessened the cost of all the art. Today things are built not to last, but to be consumed, and therefore it makes sense to omit expensive (and opinionated) design. I wish open source would lead this way. Instead of emulating the commercial companies and trying to change graphics every couple years into minimalism, cumulatively build up more intricate (and visually interesting) design. It looked like this will happen by late 90s (with all the different graphic themes and such) but then it took a turn.
    • throwanem 6y ago
      I don't know why you're getting downvoted. What the "vernacular" style of the early web lacked for intentionality, it more than made up for in variety and sheer élan. Whether we'd live in a better world today had that vernacular not been erased in practice, I don't know that anyone can say one way or the other, but there's no harm in thinking about how that world might be different from the one we have today.
    • bombcar 6y ago
      There does exist open-source software of that type (TeX for example) but amusingly it's not much used (the average person using TeX is using LaTeX on pdfTeX which, while based on the TeX source code, isn't TeX).
  • tinus_hn 6y ago
    It’s the old Demotivator poster! You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor. https://despair.com/collections/demotivators/products/achievement https://despair.com/collections/demotivators/products/achiev...
• mrtksn 6y ago
  That could definitely be the case for physical items since the production cost increases with the design complexity however is it really cheaper when you don't have to produce it beyond the design itself? Maybe it could be argued that it could be cheaper for a sweatshop that profits per artworks produced per second per designer however non-sweatshop made designs are also quite often minimalist.
  • toomim 6y ago
    Yep. As a designer, it's much easier for me to make a flat rectangle than something photo-realistic. And you know what's even easier? Putting down no rectangle. And if I have an excuse to leave out fine pixel editing -- like because it makes me look high-class -- then I'll go for lazy! Hell yeah. Designers love minimal designs because it makes their job easier, and it comes with free rationale attached, backed by Steve Jobs and Dieter Rahms themselves. It's a laziness that nobody can fire us for. We love it. We LOOOVE it.
    • mrtksn 6y ago
      According to your bio, you are supposed to be "Independent Scientist in Computer Science and Psychology", so are you trolling or do I fail to get the joke here?
      • toomim 6y ago
        My research area is Human-Computer Interaction, aka "UI Design." It combines Computer Science and Psychology. I am also a practicing designer.
  • bluGill 6y ago
    Physical items can get elements of scale for somewhat complex shapes. That is why almost all houses have one of 3 different spindle patterns for their railing, someone invested in the machines to mass produce that pattern and so it is just as cheap as a simpler pattern that would work just as well. If you want a different pattern for your spindles you will pay though as it isn't mass produced.
• WalterBright 6y ago
  My website is minimal because I have no graphic design talent whatsoever.
  • yoz-y 6y ago
    It goes the same for a lot of indie apps, of which there are tons. Flat design levels the playing field.
  • throwanem 6y ago
    I think that's properly called High Vernacular Brutalism. Kidding aside, anyone looking at my site today can tell a) that I had no design skill when I set it up, and also b) that I sucked at picking Wordpress themes besides. I have some plans for that, but it's not really a high priority at the moment; other projects are interesting me more.
• Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Icons are an interesting use case; I think they are made to be scalable and recognizable from a 16x16px favicon, regular sized website logo, various sized app icons, and massive billboard sized. I mean I've got a DHL track&trace tab open and its icon looks like a red line in a yellow square, so they haven't designed a recognizable new logo yet for that use case. HN / YC's icon is much better in that regard. Github is also open and that too is quite recognizable.
• zozbot234 6y ago
  Pixel art is actually very easy and cheap to create, even cheaper than a vector icon of the same resolution/color depth. The issue is that it doesn't easily lead to pixel-perfect rendering at any resolution; there are good resampling algorithms but they work in fixed steps like 2x or 3x.
  • throwanem 6y ago
    It seems like pixel art would be an ideal case for automatic vectorization - literally just a series of adjacent colored squares, one per pixel, and the resulting vector could be scaled at will with no loss of fidelity. It seems so easy to automate that I might do it later just for kicks, and it also seems so obvious that I can't possibly believe I'm the first to have thought of it. Is it just not a common practice, or are there difficulties I'm not seeing, or is there maybe something else here I'm missing? edit: Ah, OK, found some prior art: https://www.drububu.com/tutorial/bitmap-to-vector.html https://www.drububu.com/tutorial/bitmap-to-vector.html
• amadeuspagel 6y ago
  But this doesn't explain why companies would replace icons that they already have with minimalist icons. That's an additional expense, no matter how small.
• jayd16 6y ago
  I don't think this is correct, at least for graphic designers. I don't know about you but all the designers I know would gladly show you pages and pages of pixel-pushed, pixel-perfect designs. But those don't easily scale to different dpi and layout sizes. There are non-standard ways but nothing has taken over. So flat icons and solid colors it is.
  • Silhouette 6y ago
    But those don't easily scale to different dpi and layout sizes. There are non-standard ways but nothing has taken over. So flat icons and solid colors it is. For a long time, designers/artists might have produced several versions of the "same" icon at different sizes for use in different contexts. Sometimes you'd have a large area to work with, maybe 128x128 or 256x256 pixels. You could have a lot of detail at those sizes, in whatever visual style you liked. At smaller sizes, you didn't just scale down the large icon mechanically. Instead, you'd redraw it to preserve the essence but remove finer details and simplify the overall design as you had fewer pixels to work with. A similar idea existed in type design. A comprehensive font family might include different "optical sizes". A caption font designed for use at small sizes might have lower stroke contrast, while a display font intended for use with large headlines might feature finely detailed serifs that wouldn't work well at small sizes. If you took the caption font at 8pt and the display font at 48pt and scaled them mechanically to be the same size, they'd look quite different. In both cases, the advent of mechanically scalable image formats like SVGs and most digital font formats marked a change in common practice. Now you only needed one file to work at any size you wanted, but the subtlety I was talking about above is lost if you're no longer creatively adapting the same basic design for different contexts but instead you have to draw a kind of lowest common denominator that works tolerably at all sizes. As others have observed, this shift certainly makes things cheaper, but potentially at the expense of quality of design. We only need to look at the bland, homogenous nature of sites built with flat design and its derivatives, not to mention all the obvious usability problems, to see that the popular approach right now isn't actually very good.
• itronitron 6y ago
  Good UI design focuses on reducing visual noise in order to help people use the interface. Occasionally they go too far, and I would argue that decoration can be an important part in differentiating parts of a design for the viewer ( a touch of class, as it were ).
• austinjp 6y ago
  I have a suspicion this is partly because the ordinary middle class are poorer today, comparatively. We have more stuff, but it's lower quality. Anything built to last is beyond what many can afford. And there are structural reasons why it doesn't make sense to buy built-to-last items: nobody repairs them any more. You could save money and buy one or two really good pairs of shoes, like your great-grandparents probably did. But cobblers and shoe repair shops are doing out. Instead of saving a month's wages for a pair of shoes that would last many years, it's easier to spend a day's wages on something that will wear out within a year. Plus, of course, you might be able to buy several pairs in multiple styles! Woop! More variety, more sales, more landfill. Fashion à la môde, indeed. I think it's exactly the same with iron railings. It's similar with domestic appliances, most consumer goods, food, etc etc.
• nonameiguess 6y ago
  I'm not sure how much this applies to web design but the reason for non-ornate standard banisters and what not is mass production. The population was much smaller and far fewer houses being built 130 years ago. Artisan manufacturing doesn't scale.