Fashion and special-snowflaking UIs has been a disaster for the human race. FlatUI/minimalism has wrecked web usability for a decade now, making buttons look l

Fashion and special-snowflaking UIs has been a disaster for the human race. FlatUI/minimalism has wrecked web usability for a decade now, making buttons look like tags look like inputs look like boxes, everything is a box. Very few people have been able to stand up against this trend without being ignored or shouted down. My theory is that this is due to the confluence of two things: First, purity spiraling in a western elite class, as happened with architecture (see "From Bauhaus to Our House" and the Yale Box, now we have the FlatUI Box). Perhaps more importantly, this trend is cheap: you don't need skilled laborers to produce a yale box and you don't need skilled designers to produce a passable FlatUI, whereas other options take time & skill (read: money). This dovetails with the corporate ethos of cost minimization. These two trends in harmonic resonance with one another make minimalism/flat the default mode, which forces designers into increasingly bizarre UX patterns to express themselves. This is not unlike the post-modern movement in architecture.