4 ms·

Too many people want "clean" and "modern" designs because they like the way it looks, usability be damned.

• ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  A lot of low skilled designers entered the workforce and they really fell in love with "clean ui" because it required so much less skill compared to making icons like these.
  • alxlaz 4y ago
    Yep. This is the uncomfortable truth: back in the heyday of Aqua, if you wanted a good icon, you had to pay a skilled artist about 40% of the sum that, today, gets you a full app design sketch. Folks look at the cool designs from that era (and late '90s Windows) and want them back. You can't have that and $0.99 apps. If you try to get that kind of design with today's design budgets, you get exactly the kind of Y2K photo app skeumorphic design that everyone hated.
    • zozbot234 4y ago
      This may be true wrt. skeuomorphic Aqua-like designs, but pixel art with low native resolution and low color depth is the cheapest style of them all, only literal pencil drawings on the back of a napkin are cheaper. Look at SerenityOS for the kind of polished design that can be achieved with ease even by amateurs.
      • alxlaz 4y ago
        That is still substantially more expensive than flat/symbolic icons, simply on account of it requiring human effort. A substantial number of modern-style icons and logos that you see in the wild are obtained by (lightly) retouching the best our of a handful of auto-generated candidates. Since most logos are just "stylish" text now, and most icons are just variations on some letters/geometric shapes, there's a pretty lucrative grey market of tools that pump these out programatically.