20 ms·

The Reemergence of Style in Software

schleck8 5y ago
I don't want to know how much money was paid for these logos https://future.a16z.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Logo-Transformation-Graphic-1.png https://future.a16z.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Logo-Tran...
- tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
  I didn't realize Pinterest had fallen victim as well. Never really liked the platform but always liked their logo. Sad.
- legutierr 5y ago
  I would barely call them logos. It's like they found the name of the company mentioned in the title of some blog article and just took a screenshot. The new Pinterest logo is downright offensive, given how great the original was.
  - schleck8 5y ago
    I totally agree. The old Airbnb logo communicated the 'air'. Now it's a salmon pink (??) generic sans serif type with a just as generic A icon
  - sanderjd 5y ago
    Yeah the old Pinterest logo is great. The old Spotify logo really isn't. Which is not to say they did a very good job on the new one....
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- mjw1007 5y ago
  « By appealing to everyone with these clean lines, gradients, and rounded shapes, no one feels particularly compelled by them. » To be honest, I think this bit of fashion is just a pendulum that swings back and forth every decade or two. One curious thing I noticed on the swing back in the opposite direction around the early 90s (when many logos changed from circles and constant-width strokes to ellipses and more 'stressed' letters): the new logos somehow seemed to me to be "cleaner" than the previous ones, even though that's also what I'd felt when things were going the other way.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  I disagree that this is a fashion -- logo design over the last 100+ years has consistantly shifted this way, while the media they are communicated in has engendered lower and lower attention span, vastly faster exposure rates per day, massive audiences. The information in the logo is being reduced for specific reasons. I agree that this is de-facto loss of diversity and culture for delivery, somewhat analagous to factory methods of goods production.
  - Frost1x 5y ago
    I don't think it's just analogous, I think it's directly related. Taylorism imposed on society by the most greedy amongst us is, in my opinion, the cause of this as they've become (or perhaps, always were) the axiomatic drivers of policy and power in western society and culture. My opinion is that this trend is due to a signal we're seeing where people are being pushed towards efficiency goals in their lives constantly due to pressures presented on them much of which flourished during the industrial revolution and carried through technology in the information age. I used to enjoy looking at something and taking 20 minutes to explore what exactly it is and assess it, it's uniqueness or lack thereof, and so on. Now, 20 minutes is too much time, when I want or need something I just need Solution for what I need so I can move to the next step of my life. I don't have time to figure out what your product or service is, I need Solution and you either offer it or not, I don't care about your aesthetics or how nice it is (I do but thats often just a bonus anymore as long as it accomplishes the goal). Heck, I don't have the time to check the space of Solution competitors to find what I need, I even outsource that to third parties to tell me what's good and not good. There are too many pressures in modern life for me to care and you better tell me what it is you do and better do it because it will effect my efficiency which directly impacts how much actual free/leisure time I do or don't have outside of my constant efficiency pressures at every turn, from everyone. In a world with less pressures of efficiency and ROI, we're more willing to explore things when failure is acceptable and the risk is more worth the potential of enriching our lives by taking a chance on Solution and see what it's all about. Hyper competitive societies don't allow this slack space. If you take this path you better hope the risk was worth it or you're wasting piles of time and money you already didn't have. While efficiency is important for healthy progress in society and a lack of pressure leads to complacency and stagnation, it's possible to go to extremes in either direction and I'd say weve crossed that point as a society on the productivity push. Some amount of leisure and excess are needed for human happiness. We see this everywhere, "does X, fast, cheap, best."
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  Can we also talk about how everyone’s clip art looks so much alike? All those tubular-limbed primary-colored simple sausage people make me wince. I guess when you’re making the 10,000th SaaS you just want to be like the others.
  - jkestner 5y ago
    “The style appears to serve as the illustrative arm of an intentional deployment of cheerful minimalism to mask the insidiousness of multinational tech corporations with friendliness and approachability.” https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-cartoons-are-here-to-protect-you-from-big-tech/ https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-...
  - Lammy 5y ago
    It’s a nice way for companies to look diverse without actually being diverse.
sesuximo 5y ago
I thought this was going to be about elegance in swe/implementations
fidesomnes 5y ago
mulieres perdita omnia.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
> blasé, blue-branded modern tools Physician, heal thyself! :-) Also - it’s a little depressing to see the Cambrian explosion of graphic style in the first 30 years of consumer software reduced to Windows and KidPix. Oh well, I guess it’s on me to “be the change I want to see in the world” and do a blog post with some other examples!
wruza 5y ago
I read it two times and didn’t get the point. It seems to me more like a bit of history and state of things article rather than reemergence examples.
zh3 5y ago
Submitted previously 6 days ago:- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28812639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28812639
quonn 5y ago
Or maybe there are few startups with real innovation that is safe from excessive competition, so now software has become merely a fashion as a substitute for innovation?
base698 5y ago
The article mentions crypto being a leader in this return to style. Some examples: - https://apeboard.finance https://apeboard.finance - https://curve.fi/ https://curve.fi/ - https://opensea.io/ https://opensea.io/ - https://www.trufflesuite.com/ganache https://www.trufflesuite.com/ganache
celeduc 5y ago
"a16z" must have an entire team dedicated to generating and promoting clickbait articles for HN.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
> Modern software’s humdrum lack of identity has resulted in users craving more interesting, opinionated tools, tools that feel like us — or a better, more interesting, wackier version of us. The above is the kind of sentence that you'll see in almost any fashion or arts magazine. Pretty fluffy stuff. Not really the kind of thing we're used to, in the engineering community. That said, I firmly believe that there's always a place for good graphic and interaction design, in technology. I don't feel that it's a problem. Some companies will stick to "the classics," while some will go overboard with the "chrome"[0], so to speak. [0] https://www.mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html https://www.mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- andybak 5y ago
  So I read the first sentence and my immediate reaction was "Well I don't. And I'm not sure anyone has ever expressed that opinion to me" and I stopped reading.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    There's a bit of truth. The era of extremely engineered everything gave birth to flat design for instance. I'm not pro skeumorphism but I remember how odd software felt good in a way. As long as it was fun (good boards, useful programs) you ended up liking the quirks.
    - andybak 5y ago
      I don’t disagree but I didn’t get any of that from that opening statement. It seems to be arguing for diversity in UI which I happen to think is usually a terrible idea.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
        > It seems to be arguing for diversity in UI which I happen to think is usually a terrible idea. I have to agree with this sentiment. I loved KPT, but that was more for the "adventure" aspect. I actually had difficulty using a lot of functions (don't ask me to remember which ones). It's frustrating, designing innovative UI that also follows convention. It's a joy, when it works. I have this iOS widget that I wrote[0]. It's really, really cool. Works a charm, and is easy to implement. But I keep on not using it in my projects. It's too "in your face." I think that UI needs to get the hell out of the way, and just let the user do what they want to do. I have a couple of more, more conventional widgets, that I use all the time[1], [2]. KPT was "in your face," like no other UI I have ever experienced. [0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#RVS_Spinner https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#RV... [1] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#RVS_AutofillTextField https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#RV... [2] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#RVS_Checkbox https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#RV...
colesantiago 5y ago
This is peak a16z marketing hype.
Tade0 5y ago
Going off on a tangent here but I clicked the link explaining why tower PCs used to be beige and it made me realize that my career didn't overlap with the era of cubicles - I entered the job market at a time when the norm was an open space plan. I wonder if I would hate the cubicle as much as I hate open space offices? Can anyone who's witnessed this transition weigh in?
- Icathian 5y ago
  I've just barely bridged it. Cubicles were better I think. It wasn't real privacy but it was at least something.
- notpachet 5y ago
  You'd have hated cubicles too, before open office became the norm. Cubicles were the open office of their day. Before them, it wasn't uncommon to have an office with your own door. Or at least sharing a larger office with another person.
  - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
    The fun part was watching the cubicle walls get shorter and shorter over the years until they vanished completely.
- heymijo 5y ago
  > Can anyone who's witnessed this transition weigh in? Sure. If you don't like the way you are treated in your organization today in an open office, you probably wouldn't like the way you are treated in one with cubicles. Cubicle environments could be soul crushing (see the movie Office Space). They offer a bit of privacy, but noise, interruptions, a boss peering over your back at your screen unannounced could all still interrupt flow and focused work.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  yes - I worked in a computer-aided chemistry company as software engineer in California in the 90s. The culture there was from the 80s, but the scientists were very hard working! (scientists may not write very good code but you know, they can write a lot of it! athlete/scientist was common in my group). I was making pretty good money and my father wanted to see where I worked once. So I used my badge to walk in with the two of us, to a ~10 meter x 16 meter open room, with about four glass walled offices on one side and the rest of the area with cubicles.. maybe two dozen or more.. some of the cubicles were "big" with a table, some medium, and then a number of ordinary ones. I was used to it, but as a male, I could see over the cube walls while walking, whereas shorter colleagues could not. Other small things about it at another time.. (some offices at Apple Inc, Cupertino were also laid out like that -- maybe they got it from their HP-imported managers). My father was silently aghast.. he was actually startled by seeing everyone in the room like that.. all the commotion. It had never occured to him that people could be arranged like a lab rat-maze (which it was really).
gumby 5y ago
I think this is an undergrad paper published on a blog. It’s hard to see if this article is really making a legit point, from a confusing typos early (swapping “form” and “function”, or claiming beige was used in software, when all displays were monochrome back then) to pulling out random historical artifacts apparently without understanding them (the Star’s portrait display was not “distinct”; on the contrary the switch to landscape happened in the mid 80s; the first Mac had both a distinct physical design and graphic clues like the trash can and floppy disk; those were not introduced in the 80s, etc). Laid upon that are a few anodyne design “observations” that have been common in graphic design articles since the early 20th century.
- makk 5y ago
  Yeah, what is going on with the a16z blog?
- pjc50 5y ago
  The claim was that beige was the color of hardware (accompanied by a link discussing this claim). Portrait displays have never been very common (TVs were always landscape). This feels like a particularly picky bit of nitpicking.
  - gumby 5y ago
    Criticizing a comment for its picayune choice of criticism is quite reasonable, but in this case I don't think applicable. I simply picked those as examples right from the beginning of the essay: the old workstations like Alto, Dorado, Dolphin, Dandelion (Star), CADR, LMI, Explorer, PERQ, blt, and even the old AAA were all portrait. That was the context into which the Star was released. It was seemingly the workstation form factor until the arrival of the PC. Likewise the sentence reading "Early computing and software stuck to shades of black, white, and beige" (emphasis mine). I only mentioned the nonsense about the trashcan later to demonstrate that this was a pervasive problem, rather than merely one brainfart at the beginning of the essay, which could have simply been poor editing. A deeper example (which I cited) also shows up right up front: the complete misunderstanding of form vs function that implies the author really didn't know what they were talking about (to cite that is to pull in a century of famous discussion; if you don't understand it how could your argument reply upon it?) I could go on but this essay isn't worth my (or your) time. There is a very interesting argument to be made on this topic, but this blog post isn't it.
cblconfederate 5y ago
> These aesthetics were both compelling and immediately understandable to newcomers I liked skeuomorphic and i think most people find it comfortable because it s familiar. What followed that seems (from the user perspective) like a horde of conceited designers who think that the user should suffer for their superior designs. Wasting people's time trying to find where the button is, if it's pressed , or what it means, is not cool. Bicycles for the mind should make us go faster. I don't see any return of style, i see more of the same inanity, like e.g. twitter's latest redesign
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I think skeumorphism is ok as long as it doesn't forget it's software so physical limitations don't have to cripple the application. Best times is when you have a bit of skeumorphism and a bit of software extensibility / genericity.
coldtea 5y ago
>By designing everything on the screen to be as photorealistic as possible, the software essentially negated needing to define its style or stance — it merely reflected the world outside of it. Not even close to reality. Aqua, iOS "skeuomorphism" had a very defined and unique style. It obviously wasn't some photograph of an actual desktop with some folders on top and a garbage can, as this makes it sound (not to mention that even if it was, there are 10000s of ways to have a unique style and stance in a photograph too). Hell, old "photorealistic" GUIs were even MORE distinct from one another than today, with everybody having their same-looking flat UIs.
- nsonha 5y ago
  didn't Aqua introduce the dock, the most useless UI element on desktop? It baffes me that linux DEs these days have moved from some single bar that mimics the efficient Windows taskbar, to the "menubar and dock" anti-functional design copied from MacOS
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >didn't Aqua introduce the dock, the most useless UI element on desktop? No, that would be NeXT OS. Through the NeXT dock had different look, and slightly different behavior.
JustAnonymous 5y ago
Modern UI/UX design is mass-produced, homogenized rubbish. The cadres who have plunged us into this abyss of anti-usability can no more be relied upon to undo their mistakes than they could to come up with a usable design to begin with.
gjvc 5y ago
This article takes many words to say very little. If anything, "style" in software peaked in the public mind with the rise of Mac OS X in the early 2000s where the Aqua theme was juicy, looked like you wanted to lick it, and combined with things like the genie animation gave Mac OS X a wonderful sense of character. (Probably peaking at 10.6/Snow Leopard.) This character has been systematically removed from the system since then, with successive updates since Apple began, lemming-like, to follow some "thought" "leader" in "design" believing that flatness in UI design was somehow "modern" and innovative. (The irony is that the flat buttons use less CPU/GPU power to render than the shaded three-dimensional ones which preceded them, something of which we now have orders of magnitude more.)
mikewarot 5y ago
Pascal has style, simplicity, and an elegance about it. It was roundly criticized for the small differences from C (we always complain the most about the smallest details) So instead we now have constructor factories that turn out classes so that you can abstract away what used to be a simple Record type in Pascal, in only 5 times the number of lines of code. I strongly suggest reconsidering, and moving to the more elegant solution.

I don't want to know how much money was paid for these logos https://future.a16z.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Logo-Transformation-Graphic-1.png https://future.a16z.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Logo-Tran...

tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
I didn't realize Pinterest had fallen victim as well. Never really liked the platform but always liked their logo. Sad.
legutierr 5y ago
I would barely call them logos. It's like they found the name of the company mentioned in the title of some blog article and just took a screenshot. The new Pinterest logo is downright offensive, given how great the original was.
- schleck8 5y ago
  I totally agree. The old Airbnb logo communicated the 'air'. Now it's a salmon pink (??) generic sans serif type with a just as generic A icon
- sanderjd 5y ago
  Yeah the old Pinterest logo is great. The old Spotify logo really isn't. Which is not to say they did a very good job on the new one....
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mjw1007 5y ago
« By appealing to everyone with these clean lines, gradients, and rounded shapes, no one feels particularly compelled by them. » To be honest, I think this bit of fashion is just a pendulum that swings back and forth every decade or two. One curious thing I noticed on the swing back in the opposite direction around the early 90s (when many logos changed from circles and constant-width strokes to ellipses and more 'stressed' letters): the new logos somehow seemed to me to be "cleaner" than the previous ones, even though that's also what I'd felt when things were going the other way.
mistrial9 5y ago
I disagree that this is a fashion -- logo design over the last 100+ years has consistantly shifted this way, while the media they are communicated in has engendered lower and lower attention span, vastly faster exposure rates per day, massive audiences. The information in the logo is being reduced for specific reasons. I agree that this is de-facto loss of diversity and culture for delivery, somewhat analagous to factory methods of goods production.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  I don't think it's just analogous, I think it's directly related. Taylorism imposed on society by the most greedy amongst us is, in my opinion, the cause of this as they've become (or perhaps, always were) the axiomatic drivers of policy and power in western society and culture. My opinion is that this trend is due to a signal we're seeing where people are being pushed towards efficiency goals in their lives constantly due to pressures presented on them much of which flourished during the industrial revolution and carried through technology in the information age. I used to enjoy looking at something and taking 20 minutes to explore what exactly it is and assess it, it's uniqueness or lack thereof, and so on. Now, 20 minutes is too much time, when I want or need something I just need Solution for what I need so I can move to the next step of my life. I don't have time to figure out what your product or service is, I need Solution and you either offer it or not, I don't care about your aesthetics or how nice it is (I do but thats often just a bonus anymore as long as it accomplishes the goal). Heck, I don't have the time to check the space of Solution competitors to find what I need, I even outsource that to third parties to tell me what's good and not good. There are too many pressures in modern life for me to care and you better tell me what it is you do and better do it because it will effect my efficiency which directly impacts how much actual free/leisure time I do or don't have outside of my constant efficiency pressures at every turn, from everyone. In a world with less pressures of efficiency and ROI, we're more willing to explore things when failure is acceptable and the risk is more worth the potential of enriching our lives by taking a chance on Solution and see what it's all about. Hyper competitive societies don't allow this slack space. If you take this path you better hope the risk was worth it or you're wasting piles of time and money you already didn't have. While efficiency is important for healthy progress in society and a lack of pressure leads to complacency and stagnation, it's possible to go to extremes in either direction and I'd say weve crossed that point as a society on the productivity push. Some amount of leisure and excess are needed for human happiness. We see this everywhere, "does X, fast, cheap, best."
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Can we also talk about how everyone’s clip art looks so much alike? All those tubular-limbed primary-colored simple sausage people make me wince. I guess when you’re making the 10,000th SaaS you just want to be like the others.
- jkestner 5y ago
  “The style appears to serve as the illustrative arm of an intentional deployment of cheerful minimalism to mask the insidiousness of multinational tech corporations with friendliness and approachability.” https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-cartoons-are-here-to-protect-you-from-big-tech/ https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-...
- Lammy 5y ago
  It’s a nice way for companies to look diverse without actually being diverse.

sesuximo 5y ago

I thought this was going to be about elegance in swe/implementations

fidesomnes 5y ago

mulieres perdita omnia.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

> blasé, blue-branded modern tools Physician, heal thyself! :-) Also - it’s a little depressing to see the Cambrian explosion of graphic style in the first 30 years of consumer software reduced to Windows and KidPix. Oh well, I guess it’s on me to “be the change I want to see in the world” and do a blog post with some other examples!

wruza 5y ago

I read it two times and didn’t get the point. It seems to me more like a bit of history and state of things article rather than reemergence examples.

zh3 5y ago

Submitted previously 6 days ago:- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28812639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28812639

quonn 5y ago

Or maybe there are few startups with real innovation that is safe from excessive competition, so now software has become merely a fashion as a substitute for innovation?

base698 5y ago

The article mentions crypto being a leader in this return to style. Some examples: - https://apeboard.finance https://apeboard.finance - https://curve.fi/ https://curve.fi/ - https://opensea.io/ https://opensea.io/ - https://www.trufflesuite.com/ganache https://www.trufflesuite.com/ganache

celeduc 5y ago

"a16z" must have an entire team dedicated to generating and promoting clickbait articles for HN.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

> Modern software’s humdrum lack of identity has resulted in users craving more interesting, opinionated tools, tools that feel like us — or a better, more interesting, wackier version of us. The above is the kind of sentence that you'll see in almost any fashion or arts magazine. Pretty fluffy stuff. Not really the kind of thing we're used to, in the engineering community. That said, I firmly believe that there's always a place for good graphic and interaction design, in technology. I don't feel that it's a problem. Some companies will stick to "the classics," while some will go overboard with the "chrome"[0], so to speak. [0] https://www.mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html https://www.mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
andybak 5y ago
So I read the first sentence and my immediate reaction was "Well I don't. And I'm not sure anyone has ever expressed that opinion to me" and I stopped reading.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  There's a bit of truth. The era of extremely engineered everything gave birth to flat design for instance. I'm not pro skeumorphism but I remember how odd software felt good in a way. As long as it was fun (good boards, useful programs) you ended up liking the quirks.
  - andybak 5y ago
    I don’t disagree but I didn’t get any of that from that opening statement. It seems to be arguing for diversity in UI which I happen to think is usually a terrible idea.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      > It seems to be arguing for diversity in UI which I happen to think is usually a terrible idea. I have to agree with this sentiment. I loved KPT, but that was more for the "adventure" aspect. I actually had difficulty using a lot of functions (don't ask me to remember which ones). It's frustrating, designing innovative UI that also follows convention. It's a joy, when it works. I have this iOS widget that I wrote[0]. It's really, really cool. Works a charm, and is easy to implement. But I keep on not using it in my projects. It's too "in your face." I think that UI needs to get the hell out of the way, and just let the user do what they want to do. I have a couple of more, more conventional widgets, that I use all the time[1], [2]. KPT was "in your face," like no other UI I have ever experienced. [0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#RVS_Spinner https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#RV... [1] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#RVS_AutofillTextField https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#RV... [2] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#RVS_Checkbox https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#RV...

colesantiago 5y ago

This is peak a16z marketing hype.

Tade0 5y ago

Going off on a tangent here but I clicked the link explaining why tower PCs used to be beige and it made me realize that my career didn't overlap with the era of cubicles - I entered the job market at a time when the norm was an open space plan. I wonder if I would hate the cubicle as much as I hate open space offices? Can anyone who's witnessed this transition weigh in?

Icathian 5y ago
I've just barely bridged it. Cubicles were better I think. It wasn't real privacy but it was at least something.
notpachet 5y ago
You'd have hated cubicles too, before open office became the norm. Cubicles were the open office of their day. Before them, it wasn't uncommon to have an office with your own door. Or at least sharing a larger office with another person.
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  The fun part was watching the cubicle walls get shorter and shorter over the years until they vanished completely.
heymijo 5y ago
> Can anyone who's witnessed this transition weigh in? Sure. If you don't like the way you are treated in your organization today in an open office, you probably wouldn't like the way you are treated in one with cubicles. Cubicle environments could be soul crushing (see the movie Office Space). They offer a bit of privacy, but noise, interruptions, a boss peering over your back at your screen unannounced could all still interrupt flow and focused work.
mistrial9 5y ago
yes - I worked in a computer-aided chemistry company as software engineer in California in the 90s. The culture there was from the 80s, but the scientists were very hard working! (scientists may not write very good code but you know, they can write a lot of it! athlete/scientist was common in my group). I was making pretty good money and my father wanted to see where I worked once. So I used my badge to walk in with the two of us, to a ~10 meter x 16 meter open room, with about four glass walled offices on one side and the rest of the area with cubicles.. maybe two dozen or more.. some of the cubicles were "big" with a table, some medium, and then a number of ordinary ones. I was used to it, but as a male, I could see over the cube walls while walking, whereas shorter colleagues could not. Other small things about it at another time.. (some offices at Apple Inc, Cupertino were also laid out like that -- maybe they got it from their HP-imported managers). My father was silently aghast.. he was actually startled by seeing everyone in the room like that.. all the commotion. It had never occured to him that people could be arranged like a lab rat-maze (which it was really).

gumby 5y ago

I think this is an undergrad paper published on a blog. It’s hard to see if this article is really making a legit point, from a confusing typos early (swapping “form” and “function”, or claiming beige was used in software, when all displays were monochrome back then) to pulling out random historical artifacts apparently without understanding them (the Star’s portrait display was not “distinct”; on the contrary the switch to landscape happened in the mid 80s; the first Mac had both a distinct physical design and graphic clues like the trash can and floppy disk; those were not introduced in the 80s, etc). Laid upon that are a few anodyne design “observations” that have been common in graphic design articles since the early 20th century.

makk 5y ago
Yeah, what is going on with the a16z blog?
pjc50 5y ago
The claim was that beige was the color of hardware (accompanied by a link discussing this claim). Portrait displays have never been very common (TVs were always landscape). This feels like a particularly picky bit of nitpicking.
- gumby 5y ago
  Criticizing a comment for its picayune choice of criticism is quite reasonable, but in this case I don't think applicable. I simply picked those as examples right from the beginning of the essay: the old workstations like Alto, Dorado, Dolphin, Dandelion (Star), CADR, LMI, Explorer, PERQ, blt, and even the old AAA were all portrait. That was the context into which the Star was released. It was seemingly the workstation form factor until the arrival of the PC. Likewise the sentence reading "Early computing and software stuck to shades of black, white, and beige" (emphasis mine). I only mentioned the nonsense about the trashcan later to demonstrate that this was a pervasive problem, rather than merely one brainfart at the beginning of the essay, which could have simply been poor editing. A deeper example (which I cited) also shows up right up front: the complete misunderstanding of form vs function that implies the author really didn't know what they were talking about (to cite that is to pull in a century of famous discussion; if you don't understand it how could your argument reply upon it?) I could go on but this essay isn't worth my (or your) time. There is a very interesting argument to be made on this topic, but this blog post isn't it.

cblconfederate 5y ago

> These aesthetics were both compelling and immediately understandable to newcomers I liked skeuomorphic and i think most people find it comfortable because it s familiar. What followed that seems (from the user perspective) like a horde of conceited designers who think that the user should suffer for their superior designs. Wasting people's time trying to find where the button is, if it's pressed , or what it means, is not cool. Bicycles for the mind should make us go faster. I don't see any return of style, i see more of the same inanity, like e.g. twitter's latest redesign

agumonkey 5y ago
I think skeumorphism is ok as long as it doesn't forget it's software so physical limitations don't have to cripple the application. Best times is when you have a bit of skeumorphism and a bit of software extensibility / genericity.

coldtea 5y ago

>By designing everything on the screen to be as photorealistic as possible, the software essentially negated needing to define its style or stance — it merely reflected the world outside of it. Not even close to reality. Aqua, iOS "skeuomorphism" had a very defined and unique style. It obviously wasn't some photograph of an actual desktop with some folders on top and a garbage can, as this makes it sound (not to mention that even if it was, there are 10000s of ways to have a unique style and stance in a photograph too). Hell, old "photorealistic" GUIs were even MORE distinct from one another than today, with everybody having their same-looking flat UIs.

nsonha 5y ago
didn't Aqua introduce the dock, the most useless UI element on desktop? It baffes me that linux DEs these days have moved from some single bar that mimics the efficient Windows taskbar, to the "menubar and dock" anti-functional design copied from MacOS
- coldtea 5y ago
  >didn't Aqua introduce the dock, the most useless UI element on desktop? No, that would be NeXT OS. Through the NeXT dock had different look, and slightly different behavior.

JustAnonymous 5y ago

Modern UI/UX design is mass-produced, homogenized rubbish. The cadres who have plunged us into this abyss of anti-usability can no more be relied upon to undo their mistakes than they could to come up with a usable design to begin with.

gjvc 5y ago

This article takes many words to say very little. If anything, "style" in software peaked in the public mind with the rise of Mac OS X in the early 2000s where the Aqua theme was juicy, looked like you wanted to lick it, and combined with things like the genie animation gave Mac OS X a wonderful sense of character. (Probably peaking at 10.6/Snow Leopard.) This character has been systematically removed from the system since then, with successive updates since Apple began, lemming-like, to follow some "thought" "leader" in "design" believing that flatness in UI design was somehow "modern" and innovative. (The irony is that the flat buttons use less CPU/GPU power to render than the shaded three-dimensional ones which preceded them, something of which we now have orders of magnitude more.)

mikewarot 5y ago

Pascal has style, simplicity, and an elegance about it. It was roundly criticized for the small differences from C (we always complain the most about the smallest details) So instead we now have constructor factories that turn out classes so that you can abstract away what used to be a simple Record type in Pascal, in only 5 times the number of lines of code. I strongly suggest reconsidering, and moving to the more elegant solution.