7 ms·

Can't help but notice that we keep wanting to make content that should be flat more 3D (e.g., animated 3D backgrounds, scroll filler on corporate pages, the ent

by bm3719 4y ago

Can't help but notice that we keep wanting to make content that should be flat more 3D (e.g., animated 3D backgrounds, scroll filler on corporate pages, the entire metaverse), and content that could benefit from being 3D more flat (like UI buttons losing their pseudo-3D bevels and not looking like interactive widgets at all).

ilkke 4y ago
Re UI, my theory is that this is partly because minimalism doesn't become dated as fast. Related, I remember that what blew me away upon seeing the 3DS for the first time was not the 3d playfield (which looked exactly as I expected), but the UI in 3D. It really felt like a glimpse into an exciting future.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  Here's why minimalism has such staying power. Fundamentally, pleasing design is about repetition and consistency. Brian loves patterns, that's all there is to it. Good graphic appeal isn't a seasoning like salt which you can just sprinkle on by paying for a few better "designed" assets. Its possible to make really pleasing design out of parts that are individually seen as cheap and low quality. Its also possible to make tacky tripe out of great quality parts. The important thing is consistency and arrangement. A pleasing design is one that lends itself to file compression. Minimalism is a very easy style to pull off because the fewer elements there are the easier it is to make them all consistent, uniform, simple. It takes the least time to get it right. It can be handed off to someone else without explaining any "vision" or guidelines. None of this is to say it is bad. Minimalism is good actually. Just that minimalism isn't uniquely good. Other designs can be timeless, they just rarely are.
  - wolpoli 4y ago
    I don't think we'll be seeing a move away from minimalism for the foreseeable future. The style itself will continue to evolve (hey, we just got rounded corners back!), but it'll within the confine of CSS so that no graphical/svg assets will need to be created. We'll have minimalism until a browser maker decides to make background: golfstream-leather('brown') and felt-cloth('green') work in CSS.
    - dgb23 4y ago
      I would assume this to be possible with CSS houdini, which extends CSS with custom JavaScript.
    - noduerme 4y ago
      I say this as a lover of Flash - This was exactly why when people picture "Flash websites" in their mind, they think of these fucked up textured insane things with interface bunnies strewn around a red pleather couch or something.
  - dgb23 4y ago
    A recent trend seems to be to combine minimalism, tackyness and deliberate inconsistencies in order to feel more playful and friendly. IMO these designs are also clear, because they allow themselves to let things pop out and have very strong accents and contrast.
    - nonethewiser 4y ago
      Neo brutalism?
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
    Brian may love patterns and minimalism, but I am Ryan and I love chaos and maximalism.
    - IIAOPSW 4y ago
      What if I told you Ryan and Brain were the same character this entire time. Pixes music starts playing as buildings explode
      - paledot 4y ago
        I don't know what's going on, but I'm 1000% here for this Fight Club/Pinky and the Brain crossover. If it's your first time, narf!
    - noduerme 4y ago
      See, me personally, this is what I want in my medical device software. Gimme the data. I'll learn the six different modes for each button, and fly through that shit to find what I want. Sadly, we're training people to live with less control and a shallower understanding by presenting everything in these slim little interfaces. Minimalism elides.
      - threatofrain 4y ago
        > See, me personally, this is what I want in my medical device software. Minimalism is a major factor for cognitive accessibility. If you build for the lowest common denominator then of course qualities like control must necessarily take a dive. If Google gave you more controls for search then it'd be better search, but then it wouldn't be as minimal anymore. On software you have lots of room to hide complexity for the pro user, but that's not the case for hardware.
        noduerme 4y ago
        Hah. There's truth to that, but just on a tangent, it got me thinking about the hardware of my youth versus the hardware of today. Like, when I was 8, the coolest thing to me was calculator watches. They had either 3 or 4 rows of rubber buttons, or the fancy ones had flat buttons. They weren't trying to hide their interface under a flat screen, right? They were going out of their way to give you lots of stuff to play with. They had different modes; you could cycle through stopwatches and alarms and little 1-line memos and addresses. They encouraged you to read the owner's manual that came with them. Those systems taught people how to use them, and didn't necessarily sacrifice everything to a series of wizard screens. I think somewhere around the point where design decisions started being made to help onboard people into a piece of software or hardware faster, we lost the joy of digging deep in the user manual and finding cool shit.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    I'm going to pull a print/graphic designer card and say that "minimalism" isn't actually a style. I think I understand how it's being used in this conversation as a shorthand for "2002-2012 Google UI", which had a massive impact on the way people thought about web design. But I don't think it's fair to say that the reason for the staying power of that particular type of minimalist design is simple repetition or consistency. I think it's a combination of laziness on the part of the designers and training of the population, and it has led to a lack of curiosity on the part of users when they're confronted with more complex interfaces. I think it's important to continue to buck that trend. Every interface should feel like a jewel box full of easter eggs. But having said that, design's purpose is to download information into human brains, and so [edit: clarity] the minimal opacity of the underlying information has to be the primary design goal in all cases. Sometimes though, "minimalism" in the Google web design sense actually makes the information much too opaque. The ideal design requirement should be specified as that which gives the user all the tools to navigate immediately. If those tools are a little complicated, in the words of Thomas Pynchon, "Why should things be easy to understand?" This is where I have a huge problem with iOS, just for example, hiding scrollbars on components that don't obviously look like they're scrollable - so users never realize that there are more options off to the right. That's minimalist, but it's less than the minimum information you need to use the software.
    - omnimus 4y ago
      Saying that designers are lazy and its their fault is a weak argument. For sure not all of them are lazy. Most of the time they are told what to produce. What you are talking about is economics. Its possible to deliver good results faster/cheaper and the result is more timeless. Also clean interfaces are putting function and content in front. Thats why companies choose this. So dont blame the designer but the boss/manager. Its like saying that app is slow because devs are lazy.
      - noduerme 4y ago
        I'm sympathetic to working in big corporate structures as a designer where diktats you disagree with come down from on high. So I'm not blaming individual designers here. But I do blame art departments for not fighting back against non-artistic managerial marketing decisions, and some of that blame rests on art directors for capitulating, and some of it rests on designers for not making their opinions heard to the art directors. From a corporate standpoint, listening to your marketing team instead of your design department - and instead of having an open door to designers to walk in with ideas - is extremely limiting. It's not making the most of your resources. But design departments get a certain kind of laziness in their culture once it's the case that no one upstairs is going to listen, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  - jstummbillig 4y ago
    > Fundamentally, pleasing design is about repetition and consistency. Fundamentally, what makes design pleasing is super hard to reason about. If it was mostly about repetition and consistency, any webpage that used bootstrap or no css at all would be pleasing. If pleasing minimalism was very easy to pull off, nobody would take note of Apple products.
    - somewhereoutth 4y ago
      Apple is basically Bauhaus for nerd stuff - and that is no small thing. Perhaps if the microcomputer had been first commercialised in Europe they'd all look like that anyway.
      - chaostheory 4y ago
        Personally, I view Apple more as a fashion house that sells tech.
        nfgrep 4y ago
        Those fashion designers make a pretty mean little RISC chip.
    - IIAOPSW 4y ago
      If instead of "very easy" would you be happy if I said minimalism is the "least hard" to pull off?
      - sings 4y ago
        Cue Kevin McCloud from Grand Design whose standard rant about minimalism is that it’s actually the hardest to pull off because you aren’t hiding behind anything. All of your decisions are exposed, so you have to be even more thoughtful about attaining cohesion in the final form. Of course, he is talking about buildings which is a different thing, but I think some of what he says applies to other design fields too, including UI design.
  - Hendrikto 4y ago
    > Brian loves patterns, that's all there is to it. Who is this Brian you are speaking of?
    - KineticLensman 4y ago
      The name's Damage. Brian Damage
- astrange 4y ago
  Minimal "flat" UIs are possible for normal people to implement. In the 2000s I had no idea how I was supposed to make a button that looks like it's made of drop shadows and fine Corinthian leather for a project in my free time. (For that matter I don't know how I'd get it done for a professional project either.)
  - jimktrains2 4y ago
    Why not use the system default controls and not reïnvent the wheel?
    - astrange 4y ago
      Because nobody else did, including the system.
  - seemack 4y ago
    I was right there with you. I was very supportive of the improving app UI standards at the time but it started to feel like a contest of whose design has more visual complexity and nuance vs the real usability. Windows Phone in particular was a huge breath of fresh air for me (rip) and Material Design a welcome evolution that I still feel strikes a decent balance.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  > Re UI, my theory is that this is partly because minimalism doesn't become dated as fast. Nothing looks as dated as "futuristic" stuff.
- varjag 4y ago
  Minimalism is helluva easier in dev. Throwing a few solid filled rectangles is sure cheaper than painfully drawing skeumorphic features.
- chaostheory 4y ago
  The 3DS didn’t do anything for me and a large part of the population. The same goes for the 3D glasses that went out of style years ago. The main thing it did was give me and others a headache. Otherwise, this wouldn’t have been a fad. Other than this demo, the only 3D effects that actually work (ie 3D movies) are in VR
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    The stability of the 3D feature was greatly improved on the New Nintendo 3DS, which added eye-tracking using the front-facing camera so that you could tilt and turn it and you wouldn't see a double image. I've never personally heard of anyone ever getting a headache from it, and it would be a bit silly not to use it because it doubles the screen resolution and makes everything much sharper.
dreen 4y ago
Exactly, it violates The Toilet Principle, which states that most of the time, the user of your app wants to do the thing they came to do, then get on with their life.
- screamingninja 4y ago
  Wait until you see a 3D Immersive Toilet...

by bm3719 4y ago

ilkke 4y ago

Re UI, my theory is that this is partly because minimalism doesn't become dated as fast. Related, I remember that what blew me away upon seeing the 3DS for the first time was not the 3d playfield (which looked exactly as I expected), but the UI in 3D. It really felt like a glimpse into an exciting future.

IIAOPSW 4y ago
Here's why minimalism has such staying power. Fundamentally, pleasing design is about repetition and consistency. Brian loves patterns, that's all there is to it. Good graphic appeal isn't a seasoning like salt which you can just sprinkle on by paying for a few better "designed" assets. Its possible to make really pleasing design out of parts that are individually seen as cheap and low quality. Its also possible to make tacky tripe out of great quality parts. The important thing is consistency and arrangement. A pleasing design is one that lends itself to file compression. Minimalism is a very easy style to pull off because the fewer elements there are the easier it is to make them all consistent, uniform, simple. It takes the least time to get it right. It can be handed off to someone else without explaining any "vision" or guidelines. None of this is to say it is bad. Minimalism is good actually. Just that minimalism isn't uniquely good. Other designs can be timeless, they just rarely are.
- wolpoli 4y ago
  I don't think we'll be seeing a move away from minimalism for the foreseeable future. The style itself will continue to evolve (hey, we just got rounded corners back!), but it'll within the confine of CSS so that no graphical/svg assets will need to be created. We'll have minimalism until a browser maker decides to make background: golfstream-leather('brown') and felt-cloth('green') work in CSS.
  - dgb23 4y ago
    I would assume this to be possible with CSS houdini, which extends CSS with custom JavaScript.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    I say this as a lover of Flash - This was exactly why when people picture "Flash websites" in their mind, they think of these fucked up textured insane things with interface bunnies strewn around a red pleather couch or something.
- dgb23 4y ago
  A recent trend seems to be to combine minimalism, tackyness and deliberate inconsistencies in order to feel more playful and friendly. IMO these designs are also clear, because they allow themselves to let things pop out and have very strong accents and contrast.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    Neo brutalism?
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
  Brian may love patterns and minimalism, but I am Ryan and I love chaos and maximalism.
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    What if I told you Ryan and Brain were the same character this entire time. Pixes music starts playing as buildings explode
    - paledot 4y ago
      I don't know what's going on, but I'm 1000% here for this Fight Club/Pinky and the Brain crossover. If it's your first time, narf!
  - noduerme 4y ago
    See, me personally, this is what I want in my medical device software. Gimme the data. I'll learn the six different modes for each button, and fly through that shit to find what I want. Sadly, we're training people to live with less control and a shallower understanding by presenting everything in these slim little interfaces. Minimalism elides.
    - threatofrain 4y ago
      > See, me personally, this is what I want in my medical device software. Minimalism is a major factor for cognitive accessibility. If you build for the lowest common denominator then of course qualities like control must necessarily take a dive. If Google gave you more controls for search then it'd be better search, but then it wouldn't be as minimal anymore. On software you have lots of room to hide complexity for the pro user, but that's not the case for hardware.
      - noduerme 4y ago
        Hah. There's truth to that, but just on a tangent, it got me thinking about the hardware of my youth versus the hardware of today. Like, when I was 8, the coolest thing to me was calculator watches. They had either 3 or 4 rows of rubber buttons, or the fancy ones had flat buttons. They weren't trying to hide their interface under a flat screen, right? They were going out of their way to give you lots of stuff to play with. They had different modes; you could cycle through stopwatches and alarms and little 1-line memos and addresses. They encouraged you to read the owner's manual that came with them. Those systems taught people how to use them, and didn't necessarily sacrifice everything to a series of wizard screens. I think somewhere around the point where design decisions started being made to help onboard people into a piece of software or hardware faster, we lost the joy of digging deep in the user manual and finding cool shit.
- noduerme 4y ago
  I'm going to pull a print/graphic designer card and say that "minimalism" isn't actually a style. I think I understand how it's being used in this conversation as a shorthand for "2002-2012 Google UI", which had a massive impact on the way people thought about web design. But I don't think it's fair to say that the reason for the staying power of that particular type of minimalist design is simple repetition or consistency. I think it's a combination of laziness on the part of the designers and training of the population, and it has led to a lack of curiosity on the part of users when they're confronted with more complex interfaces. I think it's important to continue to buck that trend. Every interface should feel like a jewel box full of easter eggs. But having said that, design's purpose is to download information into human brains, and so [edit: clarity] the minimal opacity of the underlying information has to be the primary design goal in all cases. Sometimes though, "minimalism" in the Google web design sense actually makes the information much too opaque. The ideal design requirement should be specified as that which gives the user all the tools to navigate immediately. If those tools are a little complicated, in the words of Thomas Pynchon, "Why should things be easy to understand?" This is where I have a huge problem with iOS, just for example, hiding scrollbars on components that don't obviously look like they're scrollable - so users never realize that there are more options off to the right. That's minimalist, but it's less than the minimum information you need to use the software.
  - omnimus 4y ago
    Saying that designers are lazy and its their fault is a weak argument. For sure not all of them are lazy. Most of the time they are told what to produce. What you are talking about is economics. Its possible to deliver good results faster/cheaper and the result is more timeless. Also clean interfaces are putting function and content in front. Thats why companies choose this. So dont blame the designer but the boss/manager. Its like saying that app is slow because devs are lazy.
    - noduerme 4y ago
      I'm sympathetic to working in big corporate structures as a designer where diktats you disagree with come down from on high. So I'm not blaming individual designers here. But I do blame art departments for not fighting back against non-artistic managerial marketing decisions, and some of that blame rests on art directors for capitulating, and some of it rests on designers for not making their opinions heard to the art directors. From a corporate standpoint, listening to your marketing team instead of your design department - and instead of having an open door to designers to walk in with ideas - is extremely limiting. It's not making the most of your resources. But design departments get a certain kind of laziness in their culture once it's the case that no one upstairs is going to listen, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  > Fundamentally, pleasing design is about repetition and consistency. Fundamentally, what makes design pleasing is super hard to reason about. If it was mostly about repetition and consistency, any webpage that used bootstrap or no css at all would be pleasing. If pleasing minimalism was very easy to pull off, nobody would take note of Apple products.
  - somewhereoutth 4y ago
    Apple is basically Bauhaus for nerd stuff - and that is no small thing. Perhaps if the microcomputer had been first commercialised in Europe they'd all look like that anyway.
    - chaostheory 4y ago
      Personally, I view Apple more as a fashion house that sells tech.
      - nfgrep 4y ago
        Those fashion designers make a pretty mean little RISC chip.
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    If instead of "very easy" would you be happy if I said minimalism is the "least hard" to pull off?
    - sings 4y ago
      Cue Kevin McCloud from Grand Design whose standard rant about minimalism is that it’s actually the hardest to pull off because you aren’t hiding behind anything. All of your decisions are exposed, so you have to be even more thoughtful about attaining cohesion in the final form. Of course, he is talking about buildings which is a different thing, but I think some of what he says applies to other design fields too, including UI design.
- Hendrikto 4y ago
  > Brian loves patterns, that's all there is to it. Who is this Brian you are speaking of?
  - KineticLensman 4y ago
    The name's Damage. Brian Damage
astrange 4y ago
Minimal "flat" UIs are possible for normal people to implement. In the 2000s I had no idea how I was supposed to make a button that looks like it's made of drop shadows and fine Corinthian leather for a project in my free time. (For that matter I don't know how I'd get it done for a professional project either.)
- jimktrains2 4y ago
  Why not use the system default controls and not reïnvent the wheel?
  - astrange 4y ago
    Because nobody else did, including the system.
- seemack 4y ago
  I was right there with you. I was very supportive of the improving app UI standards at the time but it started to feel like a contest of whose design has more visual complexity and nuance vs the real usability. Windows Phone in particular was a huge breath of fresh air for me (rip) and Material Design a welcome evolution that I still feel strikes a decent balance.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
> Re UI, my theory is that this is partly because minimalism doesn't become dated as fast. Nothing looks as dated as "futuristic" stuff.
varjag 4y ago
Minimalism is helluva easier in dev. Throwing a few solid filled rectangles is sure cheaper than painfully drawing skeumorphic features.
chaostheory 4y ago
The 3DS didn’t do anything for me and a large part of the population. The same goes for the 3D glasses that went out of style years ago. The main thing it did was give me and others a headache. Otherwise, this wouldn’t have been a fad. Other than this demo, the only 3D effects that actually work (ie 3D movies) are in VR
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  The stability of the 3D feature was greatly improved on the New Nintendo 3DS, which added eye-tracking using the front-facing camera so that you could tilt and turn it and you wouldn't see a double image. I've never personally heard of anyone ever getting a headache from it, and it would be a bit silly not to use it because it doubles the screen resolution and makes everything much sharper.

dreen 4y ago

Exactly, it violates The Toilet Principle, which states that most of the time, the user of your app wants to do the thing they came to do, then get on with their life.

screamingninja 4y ago
Wait until you see a 3D Immersive Toilet...