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I understand why trends have moved away from skeuomorphism. It's inefficient to have image assets for every inch of the screen, and it adds more visual noise t

by skohan 4y ago

I understand why trends have moved away from skeuomorphism. It's inefficient to have image assets for every inch of the screen, and it adds more visual noise to parse for the user. Also it was easier to deliver these types of designs in high quality when there was exactly one screen size/aspect ratio to support. At the same time, I was making apps during the skeuomorphic period, and it was a lot of fun! We used to pour a lot of effort into the UI, creating simulated lighting effects, and I'm glad I got to be a part of that period of app design.

sprash 4y ago
> It's inefficient to have image assets for every inch of the screen With modern GPUs pushing bitmaps is actually far more efficient than drawing shapes. > it adds more visual noise to parse for the user On the contrary. It gives better visual cues on where to find what you need. Also noise is actually good in some cases. I have a blue noise background for my terminals which tremendously helps with eyestrain.
- skohan 4y ago
  > With modern GPUs pushing bitmaps is actually far more efficient than drawing shapes. No I mean it's inefficient from a product development standpoint. With a flat design, you can make a design system which will scale very easily to multiple screen sizes and aspect ratios. If you have to texture everything there is much more you have to account for. > I have a blue noise background for my terminals which tremendously helps with eyestrain. Yeah I mean blue noise is one thing, it's explicitly non-information, but I think in general trying to parse text on top of a pattern is harder than without.
  - sebastianconcpt 4y ago
    The smart layouting of the frames is not a feature that has to be exclusive for flat. Is a layer of functionality to implement UIs, right? Flat kind of stops there but your GUI visual style is not forced to stop there. I might be cheaper to stop there. But not mandatory, rigth?
    - skohan 4y ago
      Yeah sure it's always an option. I just think as mobile has gotten more complicated, the whole development pipeline gets wider. So in other words, having to support so many different targets means more work for designers, more work for developers and more work for QA. So to justify going above and beyond in an aspect which is going to increase the workload for all of those people, you had better have a really good reason.
sebastianconcpt 4y ago
Art is not noise. It's the opposite. Art is a concrete rendering of a symbol with the opposite of noise: meaning. The compulsion to send a more artistic asset to the category of noise is the replication of the anti-aesthetics culture in GUIs current designs. As if it would not be alternatives, like appreciation of it in lighter forms, which, Neuomorphism feels like a reasonable attempt at that.
- skohan 4y ago
  Most apps are just products which serve a function, not art. Like they used to put a lot of extra ornamentation on buildings during the baroque period, but eventually people mostly stopped doing it because the building functions just the same without it, and it's harder to add it.
  - sebastianconcpt 4y ago
    Yes, we agree there is a cost motivator. All games are apps. All games are expressions of art. The price of removing all possibility of art in software, leads to an expression of some kind of software brutalism and UIs that only a niche of temperaments would be fine to work with (and feel from suckish to a torture for the rest). Have you noticed that we could be talkning about almost the same but factor out the subject of the discussion and make it music?
    - skohan 4y ago
      Pretty far from you there. First of all, not all games are art. A lot of mobile games are effectively slot machines optimized to get you to keep pumping in quarters for a chance to feel rewarded. And music is quite different from most apps. The entire purpose of music is to convey a feeling, emotion, or energy level. The aesthetics are deeply intertwined with the intrinsic value music brings to the world. An app might only exist to give me directions to the nearest grocery store. The aesthetics are adjacent to function there.
mortenjorck 4y ago
Somewhere there is a gag UI mockup I made at the peak of the Scott Forstall rich-Corinthian-leather period of what I imagined a future Safari UI might look like, in which the app's name was taken literally and given a Jeep-like makeover. That may have been a joke, but there is a certain playfulness that I think the industry is still trying to find again in the modernist period that came as a reaction to past excesses. Edit: Found the mockup: https://imgur.com/twSdV https://imgur.com/twSdV
- jibbers 4y ago
  That is incredible! It just needs a rear view mirror with the last page you visited in it ;)
danhau 4y ago
> and it adds more visual noise to parse for the user. I disagree. Skeumorphic UIs always were much easier to parse for me than flat design. Maybe I was just subjected to terrible implementations of it, but everything in flat design started to melt into itself after a while of staring at it. I had a hard time distinguishing between purely visual things and interactive widgets. I‘m speaking in past tense because things have improved. Current flat (inspired) design is easier for me than X years ago. Meanwhile with skeumorphism, I immediately groked what was what because things had correlations with items in real life. But I think the biggest helper was skeumorphic having naturally more visual depth, which helps me tremendously. But maybe that‘s just me. I also have a hard time watching Kurzgesagt videos (although they‘re also getting a bit easier for me). Their flat style is so hard on my eyes. Maybe I‘m just broken.

by skohan 4y ago

sprash 4y ago

> It's inefficient to have image assets for every inch of the screen With modern GPUs pushing bitmaps is actually far more efficient than drawing shapes. > it adds more visual noise to parse for the user On the contrary. It gives better visual cues on where to find what you need. Also noise is actually good in some cases. I have a blue noise background for my terminals which tremendously helps with eyestrain.

skohan 4y ago
> With modern GPUs pushing bitmaps is actually far more efficient than drawing shapes. No I mean it's inefficient from a product development standpoint. With a flat design, you can make a design system which will scale very easily to multiple screen sizes and aspect ratios. If you have to texture everything there is much more you have to account for. > I have a blue noise background for my terminals which tremendously helps with eyestrain. Yeah I mean blue noise is one thing, it's explicitly non-information, but I think in general trying to parse text on top of a pattern is harder than without.
- sebastianconcpt 4y ago
  The smart layouting of the frames is not a feature that has to be exclusive for flat. Is a layer of functionality to implement UIs, right? Flat kind of stops there but your GUI visual style is not forced to stop there. I might be cheaper to stop there. But not mandatory, rigth?
  - skohan 4y ago
    Yeah sure it's always an option. I just think as mobile has gotten more complicated, the whole development pipeline gets wider. So in other words, having to support so many different targets means more work for designers, more work for developers and more work for QA. So to justify going above and beyond in an aspect which is going to increase the workload for all of those people, you had better have a really good reason.

sebastianconcpt 4y ago

Art is not noise. It's the opposite. Art is a concrete rendering of a symbol with the opposite of noise: meaning. The compulsion to send a more artistic asset to the category of noise is the replication of the anti-aesthetics culture in GUIs current designs. As if it would not be alternatives, like appreciation of it in lighter forms, which, Neuomorphism feels like a reasonable attempt at that.

skohan 4y ago
Most apps are just products which serve a function, not art. Like they used to put a lot of extra ornamentation on buildings during the baroque period, but eventually people mostly stopped doing it because the building functions just the same without it, and it's harder to add it.
- sebastianconcpt 4y ago
  Yes, we agree there is a cost motivator. All games are apps. All games are expressions of art. The price of removing all possibility of art in software, leads to an expression of some kind of software brutalism and UIs that only a niche of temperaments would be fine to work with (and feel from suckish to a torture for the rest). Have you noticed that we could be talkning about almost the same but factor out the subject of the discussion and make it music?
  - skohan 4y ago
    Pretty far from you there. First of all, not all games are art. A lot of mobile games are effectively slot machines optimized to get you to keep pumping in quarters for a chance to feel rewarded. And music is quite different from most apps. The entire purpose of music is to convey a feeling, emotion, or energy level. The aesthetics are deeply intertwined with the intrinsic value music brings to the world. An app might only exist to give me directions to the nearest grocery store. The aesthetics are adjacent to function there.

mortenjorck 4y ago

Somewhere there is a gag UI mockup I made at the peak of the Scott Forstall rich-Corinthian-leather period of what I imagined a future Safari UI might look like, in which the app's name was taken literally and given a Jeep-like makeover. That may have been a joke, but there is a certain playfulness that I think the industry is still trying to find again in the modernist period that came as a reaction to past excesses. Edit: Found the mockup: https://imgur.com/twSdV https://imgur.com/twSdV

jibbers 4y ago
That is incredible! It just needs a rear view mirror with the last page you visited in it ;)

danhau 4y ago

> and it adds more visual noise to parse for the user. I disagree. Skeumorphic UIs always were much easier to parse for me than flat design. Maybe I was just subjected to terrible implementations of it, but everything in flat design started to melt into itself after a while of staring at it. I had a hard time distinguishing between purely visual things and interactive widgets. I‘m speaking in past tense because things have improved. Current flat (inspired) design is easier for me than X years ago. Meanwhile with skeumorphism, I immediately groked what was what because things had correlations with items in real life. But I think the biggest helper was skeumorphic having naturally more visual depth, which helps me tremendously. But maybe that‘s just me. I also have a hard time watching Kurzgesagt videos (although they‘re also getting a bit easier for me). Their flat style is so hard on my eyes. Maybe I‘m just broken.