10 ms·

The UI future is colourful and dimensional

• bitpush 1y ago
  What's old is now new again. The fashion industry has known this for decades, and the tech industry is catching up to that. You know what comes after "dimensional" design? Radicial minimalism. "Once you strip away everything extra, everything ornamental, what remains is the truth, and nothing more" There, I wrote a tagline for design trend of 2030.
  • Avicebron 1y ago
    "What was once considered truth in the design sense has been replaced with complacency and a stifling regression towards the mean. What we offer is an alternative; boldly intricate designs, showcasing skill, attention to detail, and a human-first detail orientation unmatched by the AI systems flooding our daily lives" There's 2035's
    • GenshoTikamura 1y ago
      A future like this would definitely be worth living through the current bullshit
  • 1shooner 1y ago
    But my calendar app would be so much easier to use if only the UI included stitched leather.
  • aleksiy123 1y ago
    What else is there?
  • BobbyTables2 1y ago
    Fluxbox will make a comeback?
    • dkdbejwi383 1y ago
      It never left my heart
  • terribleperson 1y ago
    Hasn't minimalism been the dominant trend for well over a decade now? Surely it'll need more than five years to cool off before it makes a return, assuming it even leaves.
  • hliyan 1y ago
    Just a minute ago, I clicked a "Transfer" button on my online banking UI. It's a beautiful button with an appealing font and a subtle, pleasing background gradient. But when clicked, it shows no indication that it was depressed, and I have to rely on the appearance of a modal spinner to know that I have actually pressed it. For me, peak UI was Windows 89/2000 -- largely uniform and monochrome, but just enough detail in the third dimension to know where to click, and what to expect when clicked. Also: keyboard shortcuts.
    • Kwpolska 1y ago
      In a desktop application, if a button stays in the pressed state when you let go of the mouse button, it means that the developer was lazy and is doing work on the UI thread. In a classic Windows UI, the transfer dialog would be closed, or it would disable all controls until the operation completes and then show a confirmation message.
      • thyristan 1y ago
        Well, kind of. Actually, the developer should really do some work in the UI thread beyond just sending out a "button pressed" message: When I press the button, I need immediate feedback that it was pressed and that pressing it had an effect, that things are now happening. Too many UIs, especially in the web where round-trip-times can be long, rely on just firing of a message or a network request. The response to the user, by displaying a spinner, progress bar, modal or new page only happens asynchronously and after a comparatively long delay. This means that users will sometimes repeatedly click because "nothing happens", leading to multiple messages, leading to multiple actions, leading to a big mess. So the UI thread should synchronously trigger user feedback, take a lock or other measures to prevent unintended repeated actions and start a timeout callback in case the triggered action doesn't happen in a sensible timeframe.
    • dkdbejwi383 1y ago
      This is what actual UI design is supposed to encompass. Making sure the software behaves in the way the user expects, effectively communicates state, etc. Not just fussing over icons and colours.
  • SebastianKra 1y ago
    It’s not a loop, it’s a spiral. Each idea brings a (partial over-)reaction to the last one. For example, flat monochrome icons emerged, because previously the UI was massively overshadowing the main content [^1]. So we traded the recognizability of icons for a better overall hierarchy in the UI. Now that this problem is solved, designers are looking to reintroduce recognizable icons without sacrificing the previous goals. In the AirBnB app, you’ll find that the busy icons are only used when they’re the main focus. Auxiliary icons remain flat. [^1]: https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/facebook-3-5-iphone.jpg https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/fac...
    • layer8 1y ago
      Flat, monochrome icons emerged due to the hardware requirements of mobile devices with wildly differing DPI.
      • SebastianKra 1y ago
        There can be multiple reasons. But iOS went 6 years with skeumorphic icons (post-iPad, post-Retina) so mixed-dpi screens probably weren’t the only factor.
        • layer8 1y ago
          At that time iOS had the luxury that its higher-DPI variant was exactly twice the original resolution, so up- or downscaling of non-vector graphics worked well. (Similar for macOS.) Moreover, the original iPhone resolution was already relatively hi-DPI, meaning that accuracy on the individual pixel level wasn’t as important as on the typical 96-DPI desktop screen.
  • agumonkey 1y ago
    It's so weird to realize that the 2000s that I considered advanced were in fact just another segment in the timeless cycles of fads
• raincole 1y ago
  a.k.a. People are using whatever Dall-E 3 give them without curation and believing they're designers.
  • kaibee 1y ago
    Yeah, but isn't text to image kinda the perfect tool for creating certain UI? The point of an icon is to compress/transform some idea/action/whatever into an image that communicates exactly what it does/what it represents. And often the thing you want an icon for isn't some concrete concept you can represent with 5 lines, but a label that language has converged on to describe a broad but fuzzy category of stuff. Like, if you have an eCommerce store and you want an icon for mops, doesn't it kinda make sense to take your top 100 selling mops and blend them together into an icon?
    • skydhash 1y ago
      Not really, because in this case, it’s better to just use the word “mops” and be done with it. You use icons when people are familiar with them. You do not invent them on a whim.
• 1over137 1y ago
  Stop letting graphics people decide these things by aesthetics. There is hard data from people that actually work in usability on how UIs ought to be built.
  • gjsman-1000 1y ago
    Yes, but those usability people have a tendency to design interfaces for the lowest common denominator. This often ends in disaster as the lowest common denominator often cannot even navigate a “usable” interface. Meanwhile, those who aren’t in that group feel almost infantilized. I will take my extremely dense UI over an accessible interface that shows only 10 rows on a spreadsheet in 24 point font. Think of those with low vision!
    • Avicebron 1y ago
      > Yes, but those usability people have a tendency to design interfaces for the lowest common denominator. This often ends in disaster as the lowest common denominator often cannot even navigate a “usable” interface. Meanwhile, those who aren’t in that group feel almost infantilized. I fully agree with you. But ... > I will take my extremely dense UI over an accessible interface that shows only 10 rows on a spreadsheet in 24 point font. Think of those with low vision! You will be Ctrl + FrontMouseScrollWheel to read your 3rd monitor too eventually.. be nice on HN.
      • croemer 1y ago
        > You will be Ctrl + FrontMouseScrollWheel to read your 3rd monitor too eventually.. I'm failing to parse this
        • nick__m 1y ago
          I parsed that as: one day, you will have to use the zoom too.
        • dotancohen 1y ago
          Ctrl-+
• recursivedoubts 1y ago
  flat, minimalist design has been a disaster for the human race if designers need the AI hypetrain to bring back drop shadows and the basic usability affordances we had for the 30 years before they ruined things, so be it
  • abraxas 1y ago
    As much as they were a disaster for computing interfaces what they did to architecture is so much worse and so expensive to fix. So many cities are semi-permanently scarred by outrageous creations of "starchitects".
    • recursivedoubts 1y ago
      i am in violent agreement with you
• afavour 1y ago
  Not a new thought but it always surprises me how much groupthink applies in these situations. Airbnb announced a new design and we’ve all just collectively accepted that it’s the future? …what? I don’t hate the trend but I am underwhelmed. Just loaded up the Airbnb site and… it’s new icons. The actual UI I’m interacting with hasn’t changed a jot, though. Google’s Material UI stuff from a few days ago felt much more interesting.
  • hoseyor 1y ago
    I also get this weird sense that besides seemingly just having changed 4 icons, as far as I can tell, it really feels like they’re just dusting off three dimensional icons that existed back in around about the early aughts ? I’m not convinced either.
    • sixQuarks 1y ago
      It’s so stupid. I get the emperor has no clothes vibe from all of this
      • MichaelZuo 1y ago
        Your just noticing? Most of the stuff on HN isn’t exactly written by super geniuses, especially for blog posts without some kind of analysis.
        • valianteffort 1y ago
          This post was more about some midwit trying to coin a phrase than a breakdown of future design patterns one could entertain. Clout chasing nonsense.
      • boxed 1y ago
        Which emperor though? Flat design or 3d design? I do agree with the article that before the iOS 7 flat design rush the barrier to entry for indie app developers was super high because it's damn hard to make the iOS <7 style look good. Flat is easy though. But with AI tools, the old style is suddenly available to lots of people again.
• taimurayaz 1y ago
  This is fueled more by nostalgia than usefulness. That game example is horrible. It draws attention to icons more than the content itself. Makes the whole experience fatiguing.
  • barrell 1y ago
    Surprised there aren't more comments about the game example. I found it so bad - takes up so much space, provides no value, color schemes all over the place, every "icon" had wildly different rotations/perspectives. Was it a little fun? Sure? Maybe? It was cute for a moment or two. But "near production ready"?
    • forgotoldacc 1y ago
      As someone who grew up with Nesticle and ZSNES as a kid and now uses OpenEMU, the icons and visual flare are big reasons lots of people use specific emulators. ZSNES is still used by a lot of people because it's "comfy" despite the accuracy being poor. Kids downloading emulators today and experiencing 40 year old consoles like the NES and 50 year old consoles like the Atari 2600 for the first time don't want an all text UI. They want a picture of that ancient hardware. It makes their experience feel more real. In contrast, Retroarch is that it's an emulator frontend designed that has no frills in its UI, and it's designed with a mindset that everything doesn't take up much space, everything provides value, and color schemes aren't all over the place, and there aren't really any icons. And because it's the ideal HN emulator, it's difficult to use and ugly.
      • barrell 1y ago
        Oh I’m not arguing for minimalism or all text uis - I agree with the article in the sense that modern uis are boring and we need something fresh. It just seems like a very shoddy example to run a victory lap with. Design is subjective, but I don’t think many people would see that and think “yes this looks finished / is the future”. Which seems to fly in the face of the article and the point of including it
• ketzo 1y ago
  While this article is a little fluffy and overstated, I do share the overarching sentiment — UIs for the vast majority of products should be at least a little fun. “Delightful” UI/UX has become a cliché at this point, but it really does make me happy to see an element of craft and intention in the software I use, and stuff like these detailed little icons accomplishes that well!
  • echelon 1y ago
    The main point / takeaway I had wasn't whatever UI design is in fashion right now, but rather the treatment of AI tools for design: > I treat AI as just that: a tool, not a shortcut to the final result—then there’s still a lot of room for craft, taste, and care. I wholeheartedly agree with the author here.
  • constantcrying 1y ago
    Aesthetics or fun needs to be secondary to usability. If making something "fun" comes at the cost of making the design less usable, it should be avoided. Obviously companies need to define their own image in design, but that is not an excuse for bad design.
    • ketzo 1y ago
      I agree, and one issue for developers and designers alike is that often, it’s more fun to make a UI fun than it is to make it work really really well. But that doesn’t mean we should lose sight of fun completely, which I think in many places we have!
• hoseyor 1y ago
  So diamorphine is an alt. for heroin. Just saying
• hoseyor 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • LocalH 1y ago
    Why is it not? We've referred to the whole species as the "human race" for eons
    • hoseyor 1y ago
      Because race is a subdivision of a species when referring to humans, because humans like using unique terms for ourselves to differentiate between other animals. It is factually incorrect to say “human race” and seems to be an attempt to manipulate the language to manipulate people’s minds into believing the gaslighting that we are all the same and uniform profit units, like some corporate fever dream where all humans consume the same corporate slop uniformly across the globe. Are you a human with unique cultures and identity or are you a unit that produces predictable profit like a slave that is simply defined as human in the HR records? If you are the human race, why does corporate HR and corporate politics obsess about “diversity” and whether you check the ideal box to keep the “diversity” high so that there is no unifying identity to organize around to resist the abuses of the upper class?
      • LocalH 1y ago
        You seem to be viewing this through a modern lens, and treating this like it's "new" terminology being used to gaslight people. Some would say that the modern definition of "race" is what's not real, what is socially constructed. And that the "human race" is the only one with clear ties to biology. "Human race" has never had anything to do with "racial identity" or "identity politics" or anything related to any of that. It has always just meant "human species" since the 1500s.
        • hoseyor 1y ago
          That is factually incorrect. The earliest record of the related use is from the 1560s when it meant “common ancestry; bred, family, lineage”. Later scientific organization simply formalized the implied, that it is a subunit and, arguably even, a sub-subunit of order along the lines of a regional ethnic group, e.g., Appalachians, Swabians, Basques, etc. …lineage, breed, family… for which no logical argument can be made that e.g., the Northern Europeans of various regional ethnicities who have high rates of Neanderthal DNA are the same as black Africans that have zero Neanderthal DNA but have even higher rates of DNA from an unknown species. We are quite literally, objectively different species, not just races, and that should be ok … we should be ok with that.
• nosefurhairdo 1y ago
  I'm unconvinced. The article cites Airbnb and "the internet" as evidence: > After Airbnb showed off their redesign, the internet exploded with soft, dimensional, highly detailed icon sets prompted into existence using generative AI tools. One company's redesign + random proofs of concept does not indicate a real trend, and the idea that LLMs make designing with dimensionality in mind more accessible is dubious. Good design requires consistency. High dimensionality makes consistency harder to achieve. LLMs perform better when there are fewer design nuances to consider. Additionally, we can expect LLMs to reinforce existing trends, as they're all trained on what exists today.
• ramesh31 1y ago
  Gee great, the designers got bored again
• chank 1y ago
  How are we not full circle back to the early 00's with this design? It didn't really catch on then. Maybe this time? Wasn't a big fan of it then. Still not.
• choxi 1y ago
  There are some other interesting dynamics in UX that aren't just cyclical trends: - Natural language interfaces. You can now communicate with your computer with language, voice or text. There are some situations where this is an improvement, but others where it's not. It'll be interesting to see how interfaces are designed to combine the best of both worlds. - Adaptive interfaces. The UI/UX of the last period of computing is largely a solved problem. There are standard UX solutions for most types of problems. It's also become significantly easier to build these interfaces, and LLMs are pretty good at writing basic declarative UIs. I think the bar will be raised such that users expect their interfaces to adapt to them, instead of a one-size-fits-all solution. - Immersive interfaces. This might be similar to "dimensional" but more about the actual UX instead of just how 3D the buttons and icons are. I think using 3 dimensions is a natural solution for expressing higher information density. VR and AR will eventually catch on in some form.
• richardanaya 1y ago
  I can't be the only one who thinks these look ugly. Material Design Expressive feels more future forward. https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-google-research https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...
  • echelon 1y ago
    These modern designs feel so antiquated. Like being stuck to musty magazine pages. Bring me back to the era just after Geocities 1999. That pre-web 2.0 world saw some real futurism, before all the flatness took over. Even Frutiger Aero was more forward thinking than Material.
    • terribleperson 1y ago
      I miss the gradiented/pseudoreflective UI elements. It made it very easy to visually distinguish elements.
    • dotancohen 1y ago
      I'm waiting for the LCARS UI to catch on.
  • barrell 1y ago
    I find it very interesting the praise Material Design Expressive gets. Perhaps it's just because I've always been on iOS, but every iteration of Material Design seems so much more foreign to me. I'm not really criticizing it, but personally I find it to be extremely confusing to visually process. It feels a lot like language divergence. iOS and Android started at the same place (same language), then became different accents, different dialects, and (soon/now) different languages.
  • int_19h 1y ago
    The overall feeling I get from this is "form over function" and specifically "look! look! we can do fancy typography!".
• zombiwoof 1y ago
  [flagged]
• notnullorvoid 1y ago
  AirBnB's redesign isn't a indicator of design trends changing. Most of the app remains minimal and "flat", the dimensional flares are mixed inconsistently throughout. The app could more easily flop back to fully minimalist than it could into a fully 3d design language. Also dimensional icons have existed within flat UIs as app icons for quite some time, though some platforms have had periods of both flat icons and UI. In a sense they are adopting them in this existing usage as sub-app icons. The oddest thing is the glossy "new" tags, they are the only tags within the UI which are glossy. Having them mixed with flat tags and flat buttons is honestly confusing, they look more like buttons than the actual buttons do. > Back in the early 2000s, UI design like this had a high skill ceiling. It took years to master lighting, materials, and depth. Now? That level of craft is often just a prompt away. Mastering any design style takes time, and the skill ceiling is not meaningfully different if there even is one. I'm also highly sceptical that AI would be able to be consistent enough whether generating flat or 3d icons.
  • pavon 1y ago
    Yeah, the icon style is the part I care about the least when taking about flat design. It is the fact that it removes all visual affordances that something is interactive. Clickable items that don't look like buttons or hypertext, they just look like the rest of the page. Scrollable regions that don't have scrollbars or any other visual clue that there is more content below or to the right, unless some of that content happens to be cut off by the invisible region boundary. Windows whose only indication of which is selected is the title goes from dark gray on light gray, to medium gray on light gray.
• dataviz1000 1y ago
  I don't think it is 2D vs 3D, but rather 2D and 3D vs 4D which probably has these guys a little worried. The human interface is still the same but now instead of something that responds instantly or deterministically like the doorbell interface which has tactile input and auditory output, the output is automated actions in time. This is what the thinking output in LLM interface is. I don't know if the language and semantics allow me to say this but the LLM output is more than a 2D screen, it is also in time. That is the fundamental change. This might not be different from say ... clicking a button causing a massive Rube Goldberg machine to take money out of my bank account, send emails about my booking to all interested parties with signals moving across continents before in some time in the future sending me a confirmation message when everything is finished. People are beginning to think in terms of the output of the action of pressing a button to book as automation instead of just output on a screen that says successful or failed attempt to book. (If anyone from the Airbnb design team reads this, please, please, please, work on making sure that the absolute important information about a booking in text messages are visible in the text message. And that the page before booking does not hide information about the booking on an iPhone 13. You do not have control of the thousand different combinations of phones, operating systems, ect so when the information has be presented in only words it has to be done in a way that people understand them.)
• lxe 1y ago
  I do miss IconFactory, Everaldo's Crystal Clear Icons, Tango, Longhorn, and other trends from the beginning of 21st century.
  • anthk 1y ago
    Tango it's still my icon theme (Tango2). Clear outlines. On the theme, Zukitre it's flat but it has contrast.
• ookblah 1y ago
  nice. so basically we are so "back" to the icons i saw from my packard bell desktop shitty navigator OS like 30 years ago lol. everything is truly cyclical (also in fashion like what gen-z is wearing) and i'm old enough now i guess so it a little jarring to see these things playing out before my eyes.
• paul7986 1y ago
  The future is less UI and tons more interacting with AI right from your personal AI mobile device’s Lock Screen. It will do everything for you that you do now using the web ..we’ll be opening less apps and web browsers in a few years or less.
• m3kw9 1y ago
  Even after all this time I don’t like it. It looks like 90s geocities icons on modern flat iOS design. Going by feel, it looks dumb
• fxd123 1y ago
  ...except Airbnb's redesign is still extremely flat. Three icons that have 3-D shadows is not groundbreaking
• efortis 1y ago
  In 2009, I recorded a few Flash websites with 3D, videos, and parallax motions. Here’s an inspiring one: https://x.com/efortis/status/1879712687896289471 https://x.com/efortis/status/1879712687896289471
• nssnsjsjsjs 1y ago
  That animation is cool but the end result is still as flat.
• ddingus 1y ago
  About damn time!
• WhereIsTheTruth 1y ago
  "I did a quick mockup" Sure you did.. https://openemu.org/ https://openemu.org/
• diiiimaaaa 1y ago
  I think we're in a loop guys
  • District5524 1y ago
    We ARE a loop ourselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
• pier25 1y ago
  So we're going back to Aqua from 20 years ago? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• kmarc 1y ago
  While just because a company wants this, I doubt this is the future, however... Just a couple days ago I was thinking about this (and in fact, started exploring icon packs for my desktop) that all the UIs I use are reduced to "black and white" icons and widgets. Colors are missing, sophisticated shapes too. Sometimes I am actually wondering what an icon is meant to represent. At my new gig I have to use web Outlook (not allowed to use my finger-memorized mutt setup), and I must say it's a pleasure to look at the UI. Still line drawing icons, but and elegant play with colors at least. Similar to how some LibreOffice Icon packs look like. I rather hope this is the future. Use colors as accents, leverage a "grouping" functionality with them.
  • vladvasiliu 1y ago
    > At my new gig I have to use web Outlook (not allowed to use my finger-memorized mutt setup), and I must say it's a pleasure to look at the UI. Still line drawing icons, but and elegant play with colors at least. What do you mean "colors"? I have been using Web Outlook for a while, and everything is blue black and grey with a ton empty space.
    • kmarc 1y ago
      Here is an example. The toolbar has subtly colored icons: https://www.windowspro.de/sites/windowspro.de/files/imagepicker/2210/neues-outlook-benutzeroberflaeche.png https://www.windowspro.de/sites/windowspro.de/files/imagepic...
• calmbonsai 1y ago
  I'm not convinced. Show me the results of A/B study along any set of UX metrics you'd like to measure. The author uses the term "performative" without any performance metrics. Going all the way back to Parc, pre-OSX Mac OS, VRML, OpenStep, and countless widget and windows managers for Linux (anyone remember Enlightenment (https://www.enlightenment.org/about.md https://www.enlightenment.org/about.md ?) we've had deep dimensional design, animations, and heavy-weight skeuomorphics multiple times and have always returned to shallow static dimensional design for mass/generic applications. I suspect it amounts to less overall mental effort which improves workflow speed and, thus, a greater perception of interactivity. Maybe deep dimensional design will return when cheap and ubiquitous AR (augmented reality) or VR becomes a...reality, but I don't see it happening with 2D displays.
  • atoav 1y ago
    As someone who worked in IT support icons can be award winning and you'd still find people who will have a hard time understanding their meaning when there is a label written underneath them. People are lazy and don't read text in computer programs. Sit next to a user who clicked away a warning and ask them what it said. As a former freelance graphic/web designer I'd argue that the style of icon is much less important than the organization of those icons. E.g. some software will put 50 icons seemingly randomly into a toolbar and let you play a game of "find the right one". The quality of every single icon becomes utterly meaningless then as the organizing principle is wrong. That means first an icon bas to be the right choice and be used in the right context, then we can talk about readability and how well it clicks and stylistic questions come dead last. Some people think graphic design is about coming up with cool looking styles. That is literally the opposite of what good graphic design is.
  • anthk 1y ago
    Between current flat turds and Keramik/e16 there are sensitive settings: -Motif UI -Plastik -Platinum -GNUStep/NextStep -BlueCurve All of them have clear outlines and contrast. On Icons, Tango and Tango2 from Gnome are unbeatable. Maybe just Haiku/Be icons can truly be over Tango.
    • 1y ago
• tsunamifury 1y ago
  You can’t be serious that this guy is acting like he just deactivated skuemorphism.
• armchairhacker 1y ago
  I like skeuomorphism, I hope it comes back. But the best UI is custom. It would be better if apps had themable UIs so users could apply custom themes if they want to make all their apps have a particular style (e.g. metal, sepia, colorful, modern). Because then the UI can be skeuomorphic or minimal or anything else. Apple has recently been adding more UI customization. There were custom lock screens in iOS 17, custom app icons in iOS 18, and something's planned for iOS 19. It hasn't gotten much attention, maybe in part because there's still a lot you can't customize (especially in most non-Apple apps), more likely because Android is still even more customizable (especially because it's not as locked down). But Apple doing it is significant because they could start a more widespread trend.
  • Kwpolska 1y ago
    Arbitrary system-wide themes are hard to code against. You could make a dark theme for Windows 9x, but you might end up with black/dark text on a black background, because the developer changed the text colour, but left the background the default colour.
• johng 1y ago
  Those icons are great, that's the type of look that I love. I still love the look of BeOS and it's icons..
• cynicalsecurity 1y ago
  Finally. I'm so sick of the flat design.
• jazzcomputer 1y ago
  Flat silhouetted icons have a more versatile set of contexts - much like flat text does. Sure, you can express a lot in an icon that's 3D and whatnot but it needs its own stage to 'act' and really come alive, or else it'll just look a bit small, hard to read or a set of them will look too dense and over-egged on a shelf. Maximalism is visually demanding, and whilst it'll look cool, the context is too small for those kind of gaudy claims of some huge game-changer in aesthetics.- It's not I don't welcome them, as I do like diversity, but this is not gonna be some game-changer like when skeuomorphics was binned by Apple.
  • skydhash 1y ago
    Most people issues with flat design are the mixing of context. Buttons and icons are not the same. Just like normal text and links are not. And a button that have state (bold button in word processing) shouldn’t behave like something that doesn’t have one (flip button in image editing). Whether you like minimalism or not, these are constraints that impact usability. A lot of current designers eschew them.
• 0dayz 1y ago
  I'm surprised no one talked about Samsung, their new oneui has moved in a hybrid direction. In other words it reminds me more of early android design. I like it.
• simultsop 1y ago
  Back then, all sorts of designs made the web a marvel. Until algorithms kicked in. We stripped the design in favor of machine-understandable information composition. So our thing would be most recommended by AD-pumped services/listings/directories. At the end, outreach mattered more than an elegant product. Unfortunately still does.
  • rchaud 1y ago
    In addition to that, Apple and Google started enforcing style guides for apps, so a lot of the unique UIs that came about in the early days of the app store died out in favour of soulless, boxy designs that would scale well on mobile and tablet.
• politelemon 1y ago
  > It’s not meant to be a grand rebrand of design. A completely invented word. A working title for a style that embraces depth, texture, and light. Not to mimic the real world, but to create something that feels native to the screen. Something expressive. Playful. I loathe this kind of self serving pseudo humble talk. It's like trying to make or validate something out of its minuscule value. I don't agree with the author either. If anything Google's material themes have become the defacto trend setter for a while now, and I only know it by the way it "infects" my web usage over time.
  • lelanthran 1y ago
    > I don't agree with the author either. If anything Google's material themes have become the defacto trend setter for a while now Well, yes. Right now that's the trend. The author is saying that he's seeing a change now that indicates the coming end to that trend, not that the trend itself has ended. FTFA: > It’s always hard to pinpoint when a paradigm shift happens. Usually, you only recognize it in hindsight. I don't read that as "The trend has ended", I read that as "In the future (i.e. hindsight) we are going to see these events as the beginning of a new trend". Whether or not I agree with his position, to me, that is what he is saying.
    • card_zero 1y ago
      Oh OK. We can see with foresight, that in hindsight, we will see these things happening now that are currently imperceptible.
      • lelanthran 1y ago
        > Oh OK. We can see with foresight, that in hindsight, we will see these things happening now that are currently imperceptible. Let me rephrase - the author is presenting speculation as ... speculation. This is why I say that, even if I disagree, I don't see the harm in this sort of speculation.
• Aziell 1y ago
  I’m not a designer, but I’ve been around UI long enough to notice the shift. This new move toward more color, depth, and personality feels like a step in the right direction. It’s not just about things looking nicer—it actually makes digital spaces feel alive again.
• GenshoTikamura 1y ago
  So the industry first squeezed talented designers out of the UI business by shoving that ugly ass flat style down everyone's throat, and now they're proposing to cycle back to skeuomorphism which the former were capable of and replace all remaining human designers with AI.
  • keyle 1y ago
    Yep this is a good summary.
  • forgotoldacc 1y ago
    I was ready for flat design to die 10 years ago. It's astonishingly unintuitive, ugly, the opposite of style, and straight up anti-human. There are still abstract icons in some apps and UIs that I can't wrap my head around and I have to just click and hope I'm right. There are things that I cannot figure out whether they're interactive or not unless I just tap randomly. There are so many occasions where I can't find what I'm looking for because some goober decided contrast and color coding is a sin. Flat design stands against every single principle of proper design. All I can hope is 40 years from now, there isn't some "retvrn to tradition" BS where a new wave of the youth decide we should return to the "cool classic style of the 2000s-2020s". Let me be an old man and die with the software around me looking beautiful.
    • anthk 1y ago
      Proper semiflat design worked well under System7 and AtarI GEM.
      • ranger207 1y ago
        Proper flat design worked great under Windows Phone 8. Still the best phone I've ever used
    • mangecoeur 1y ago
      This will happen for sure. Designs are fashions that come and go, like jeans that go from skinny to baggy and back again. I don't think anything is absolute, tastes change and people get used to just about anything, and will mainly gripe when anything changes.
• dusted 1y ago
  I want to be excited about this, I _HATE_ the flatness of android, windows 10/11, even macos.. but I'm afraid they'll fuck it up.. the 3D objects will be actual objects, everything will be crufted on top of the bloated dumpster-fire that is "modern" UI "frameworks". If git had been with us since the 00s, we could just do a hard-reset down to the latest commit before it became flat and ugly.
• JR1427 1y ago
  Good UI and UX isn't about which icons to use etc, it's about making the user's journey through an app match how they're thinking about the problem. In my team we spend so much time picking icons, and checking that we are matching the design patterns of other apps (yawn...), that we have just ended up with a UX that doesn't prioritise the number one reason people use our app.
  • rambambram 1y ago
    This. And I'd like to add: sometimes the best icons are these little characters called the alphabet. Combined they're very powerful and are called 'words'.
    • XorNot 1y ago
      This was how I did my car PC decades ago. Just big buttons with words on them. Words become symbols and do at a glance you could still easily tell what everything is even if you wouldn't actually read it when using it.
      • pona-a 1y ago
        And then they became featureless monochrome blobs because that's the new trend, and now words are again needed to tell what each is supposed to mean.
    • blueflow 1y ago
      Characters are also easier to learn than emojis and iconographs because there are less of them.
      • powvans 1y ago
        There are thousands of Chinese characters and thousands of Kanji. Maybe we are destined to replace all existing written language with 10’s of thousands of emoji? I’ll be illiterate in that world, but my kids seem to grok it.
• simgt 1y ago
  So, same as every other kind of design: form over function and cycle in-between various styles to keep on selling. Except here I guess what's being sold is the time of the designers inside corps who need to keep on changing things to have a job. Just give me old Airbnb, old Slack, old iOS, old Google Maps, I could find my way through it just fine.
• drooopy 1y ago
  Can the UI future be Mac OS 9 platinum with 265-colour icons again, please?
  • anthk 1y ago
    System 7 was cleaner.
    • drooopy 1y ago
      I would be OK with that as well.
• hermitcrab 1y ago
  Diamorphism already has a meaning: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dimorphism https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dimorphism "the existence of two different forms (as of color or size) of a species especially in the same population. sexual dimorphism. b. : the existence of a part (such as leaves of a plant) in two different forms."
  • card_zero 1y ago
    That's di-morphic. Di- means two. Dia- means across, or between. I suppose the idea is a middle style. Unfortunate similarity to diamorphine though.
    • hermitcrab 1y ago
      You are right. Thanks for the correction. The fact that they are so similar still makes it a bad choice though IMO.
• constantcrying 1y ago
  There used to be a school of design which understood that design first and foremost is pragmatic and that it needs to be understood as a form of communication. Very few people care about design as such, they care about the functionality. For decades I have seen a bizarre iteration over various "aesthetics" of interface design, each successive step having been hailed as a new, better way to interact with our devices. Consistently each step has made interacting with devices more tedious. Design isn't about how colorful your icons are or how many dimensions they have. I think it is very clear that the quality of the work designers do has drastically declined, especially the focus of aesthetic experience over usability has been an absolute disaster.
• WalterBright 1y ago
  The style of user interfaces has gotten more colorful and dimensional, but the actual user interface has generally gotten worse. For example, I just bought a new scanner. It has a hot mess of a user interface. It mashes together all kinds of selection schemes, with little rhyme or reason. You just have to randomly click on things, navigating up and down, until you eventually find, say, the destination folder to write the scans to. Just the other day I installed Pandora on my phone. I had to ask grok how to close the app, as it has no X button. Blarf. Probably somebody got an award for this.
• Designhub 1y ago
  I think its look like the gradient type of things getting better instead of the solid color.
• mtaras 1y ago
  I hate those Airbnb icons. They look like nothing, just objects in a somewhat cartoon-y style. I much prefer where both Apple and Google move UI design.
• agos 1y ago
  if you really want to laugh, check out who is the person/firm behind this whimsical, tactile, colorful redesign. I won't spoil you the fun of guessing.
• vijucat 1y ago
  Designers are so out of touch. That whole criticism of Comic Sans is one example. Slowly, I'm coming to the conclusion that designers should never be employed, only consulted on a per-project basis. If they sit around 8 hours a day, they end up changing something or the other to justify their existence. But human beings are not used to change at such a rapid cadence. Humans take time to settle into a design and establish patterns of usage.
  • ho_schi 1y ago
    You sound like someone purchasing a new ThinkPad and "Why they added a camera bump? Sticking out of display lid. A thing nobody ask for". followed by "Why the made the base flat. But removed the rounded palm rest? Adding a sharp corner." followed by "Why the removed the dent which allowed to open the display lid, which didn't protruded out of the device?" I appreciate nice design. But if it doesn't follows function, it is harmful. PS: I'm frustrated about the new ThinkPads with a camera bump sticking out of the display. Everybody hates camera bumps. The display lid is broad and provides much space for adding multiple cameras, microphones and sensors of all kind. I know...this topic is about software UI. The change for the sake of the change itself is not beneficial.
  • tiborsaas 1y ago
    Out of all the things, you brought up Comic Sans, which is really hard to defend other than ironic use cases and no, there's no proof either it helps dyslexia. Even if it does, there are also better alternatives in the accessibility space. How many designer friends do you have? Do you know what they do daily? We know your preconception that regardless of company size and product they are just counting beans.
    • ehecatl42 1y ago
      Comic Sans has an excellent, unironic, track record as an assistive tool for young kids struggling with dyslexia.
      • tiborsaas 1y ago
• lippihom 1y ago
  Interesting - wrote this a few days ago about information density: https://www.lippihom.com/blog/designing-for-cognition-the-enduring-value-of-high-information-density-interfaces https://www.lippihom.com/blog/designing-for-cognition-the-en.... Lots of overlap with how it seems like "old" UI elements are coming back.
• layer8 1y ago
  The article really is just about using AI to create non-flat icons. The rest of the UI is still flat and hasn’t changed.
• sd9 1y ago
  The new Airbnb icons perform horribly on my 2019 Macbook. Interacting with the tabs is something like 5fps. Performance aside, the author's game selector design is so much nicer than Airbnb's implementation.
  • seabombs 1y ago
    Terrible performance for me too. Firefox, 3600X and 6800XT. Especially as the header morphs when you scroll down. I don't mind the icons and general aethetic direction, but seriously undermined by the very noticeable, janky performance. Makes it feel cheap.
• pzo 1y ago
  I'm not a fan o this design - UX is worse and everything seems like screaming for attention. I like flat design because it's easier to guide user into the most important part of the screen and avoiding distractions. I could understand maybe 3d animation so you can embed somehow more information what this icon do but making this everything so colorful is distasteful for me. For desktop I still prefer to have just on hover have text to tell what icon do.
  • virtualritz 1y ago
    I disagree in part. For the reason that in flat design, what is an interactive element and what is text or even decoration, is not clearly separated. Especially people who are older and do not spend crazy amounts of time on their smartphones, since forever, struggle with flat design. I could see this happening with my parents when the 3D UI buttons of the 80's and 90's and the skeomorphic design trend of the first decade gave way to flat design. It's just not clear where a text ends and something that can be clicked or tapped on starts. When all you have to distinguish them is a change in background color or some flat frame. You need to grow up with this tech or have an intricate understanding of digital interfaces to find this easy and/or natural. I agree as far as using 3D objects goes. This is just a gimmick and a bad idea. Any icon should be as simple as possible to convey meaning. Abstract; so it can be rendered in many adverse conditions without requiring change in shape or shading. The icon sets in that blog post are the opposite of that.
• mangecoeur 1y ago
  "The future is..." well it might be until the next fashion change comes about.
• rchaud 1y ago
  "Digital Design" has been fully subsumed by the needs of business for a long time now. When smartphones were new, an argument could be made that HCI was just as important as content in onboarding users to a new type of device with different levels of information density. There were developments like double-tap on to center a text block in the viewport, pinch to zoom, pull to refresh, swipe across cards to switch apps (WebOS came up with that one). Now? It's completely flatlined, the changes are incremental and made only in the service of getting you to buy more, view more ads and hide fees until the last possible moment in the checkout funnel.
• p3rls 1y ago
  The PC mouse wire looks like garbage, throw it out and do it over.
• deforciant 1y ago
  as a primarily backend developer I find cursor and chatgpt/grok (for more compelx components) totally amazing. I can finally build UIs that I want for my projects :) I think I have good taste (lol) I just could never spend those hours and days polishing. Now I can ask it to do some frontend while I focus on backend in the meantime. We just need the sales agent now.
• garylkz 1y ago
  So a full circle from colorful design to simplified design to flat design then to colorful design again.
• nottorp 1y ago
  All I see is annoying pointless animations. Are they part of the actual airbnb "new site" or just the article's vision?
• breadwinner 1y ago
  A while ago I read this news about Microsoft bringing back 3D and skeuomorphism: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/20/24249735/microsoft-fluent-design-illustrations-3d-overhaul https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/20/24249735/microsoft-fluent... Then it turns out Microsoft brought back 3D in the worst way possible: The non-interactive parts are now 3D — and look interactive — while the interactive parts are still flat like before. I am trying to find examples, here's one: https://imgur.com/a/8tjT42h https://imgur.com/a/8tjT42h Notice the top part has a 3D graphic which invites clicking... but it is dead. And the live parts look dead and don't invite interaction.
• IAmGraydon 1y ago
  I'm not convinced. Unlike fashion, where self-expression is central, UI/UX design isn't driven by aesthetic cycles - it's fundamentally about function. The goal is to disappear, serving as a seamless bridge between the user and the task at hand. Skeuomorphism had its moment because it provided familiarity in the early days of digital interfaces, helping users transition into a new paradigm. But that need has passed. Design has evolved, not cyclically, but linearly - toward clarity, efficiency, and minimal cognitive friction. What we're seeing now may be visually novel, but I don't believe it represents a true paradigm shift. If anything, it's a stylistic flourish layered on top of the same core goal: helping people get things done as easily and intuitively as possible.
• mmooss 1y ago
  > Back in the early 2000s, UI design like this had a high skill ceiling. It took years to master lighting, materials, and depth. Now? That level of craft is often just a [AI] prompt away. That is very interesting: Modernism and its descendents were very much about minimalism - how much could you do with minimal components. It applies to visual aesthetics (including much of abstract art), writing (e.g., Hemingway), architecture, and much else, even some music (singer-songwriters, Philip Glass). It's democratic - anyone can do it, or far more than can design complicated aesthetics. There have been other trends since, some rejecting that concept, but you can see that minimalism everywhere, in clothes, in industrial design, and even in HN's design. 'Great designers', you may have heard, 'focus not on what to add, but on what to take away'. AI enables maximalism; it could transform aesthetics in everything. It enables complexity - including in fashion, in architecture, in writing, almost everywhere. This theory is that AI removes the issue of efficiency for the creator: AI allows people to create maximalist, or non-minimalist design easily. Still, minimalism's value is very much about efficiency for the user, including focus. Excess design is a distraction and is generally not productive - how does distracting us with detailed icons help us? What is the value? I love that efficiency in modernism. HN takes the minimalist approach, iirc, in part to attract a community that is focused on its content and not bells and whistles. And I worry that in broader society, as people now routinely hide from very serious dangers (to freedom, to peace, from climate change, etc.), this new trend will be more circuses to distract us.
  • kelseyfrog 1y ago
    I think it's important to mention the two main underlying streams of thought in functional that contribute to minimalism: Louis Henry Sullivan's maxim "form follows function," and Adolph Loo's Ornament and Crime[1]. Both of these made ornamentation unjustifiable, either that ornamentation doesn't have a function, or that it is a product of uncivilized impulses. What's left is that every design choice must be functional leaving minimalism as the bleached bones of design - the only thing left after everything has been stripped away. I want to be clear that functionalism and minimalism are not synonymous, but one's impact on the other is rarely overstated. 1. https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Ornament_und_Verbrechen https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Ornament_und_Verbrechen
• 1970-01-01 1y ago
  I want a flat, low bitrate, low color, easily re-identifiable icon that, when 'clicked', depresses in a perfect square footprint to indicate that I have done an action. What is shown here is the exact opposite of what I want in a GUI.
• yapyap 1y ago
  ah yes of course - a shift happens when someone says it’ll happen AND - big businesses have such a love for color and dimension and have not been dulling everything down except for your personalized feed for years now /s
• BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  I mean this is interesting in ways, but I don’t really care which particular form of soullessness is used to advertise products I wish I didn’t have to use. It’s a marketing movement more than an artistic movement.
• shortrounddev2 1y ago
  The UI PAST was colorful and dimensional
• pie_flavor 1y ago
  The first time I visited https://svelte.dev https://svelte.dev , the non-flat-vector banner instantly won me. It just stands out from the world around it. I just sort of assumed the engineering was superior to the competition if they were going to lead with crimped metal (and was right). Flat design has always struck me as an extremist response to an issue. Windows Vista required everyone to be on the same page design-language wise in order to look good, but can the same be said of Windows XP? You can make just a few parts of your app drop-shadowed, you can add some slight reflection gradients while keeping the whole thing matte, you do not need to get rid of all visual depth just to avoid the feeling of zeerust.
• robertoandred 1y ago
  Why are people still making 2MB animated gifs...
• ferguess_k 1y ago
  Can we just have UI that is intuitive? Like, a button looks like a button, sort of.
• thepryz 1y ago
  What I find interesting is the author neglects to mention that Jony Ive was responsible for both introducing the flat design in iOS 7 they seem to lament and the AirBnB redesign they're praising as a positive paradigm shift. In my opinion, a lot recent UI/UX and visual design has become less about seeking to understand and improve the way we interact with machines and more about promoting a digital form of fast fashion full of trends that everyone is expected to follow - change for the sake of change. This post only provides more support for that.
  • dogleash 1y ago
    >a lot recent UI/UX and visual design has become less about seeking to understand and improve the way we interact with machines and more about creating a digital form of fast fashion full of trends that everyone is expected to follow - change for the sake of change In undergrad I took a course in Human Computer Interaction. It was a bunch of glorious retro materials from all the actual hard research done in the 20th century. After graduating and entering industry the most effort I've ever seen "professionals" put into HCI (and not just graphic design) is to recognize some interaction might be confusing and just go copy whatever apple does.
    • thepryz 1y ago
      My experience mirrors yours, and to make matters worse, even Apple has forgotten their roots. The changes Apple has made to Mac OS and their apps have consistently been for the worse and I no longer consider Apple to be the pillar of good design that they once were.
  • constantcrying 1y ago
    Exactly. Even much of the discussion here misses the point. Whether design is flat or has depth is totally irrelevant, when it isn't first and foremost focused on enabling humans to interact with computers. The debate about aesthetics just hides the ever declining usability of interfaces. Constantly redesigning everything so that it fits some global aesthetic mould is destructive to usability.
• gadders 1y ago
  This is all just fashion, right? None of this makes the apps easier to use. I get that EG you might find it hard to sell a green-screen app on an iPhone, but I don't see this diamorphic stuff adding much value.
• marcellus23 1y ago
  > Those aren’t my words. They’re Brian Chesky’s, CEO of Airbnb, after what can only be described as a landmark redesign of the platform. A redesign full of whimsical, animated, 3D icons and warm, tactile surfaces. I just opened the app and, aside from the animated tab icons shown in the article (which are super laggy on my device), the app looks exactly the same as always. How in the world is this a "landmark" redesign?
• mNovak 1y ago
  Lots of people talking about how this looks like 2000's clipart, (and I'm not here to disagree) but seems like no one is talking about how these appear to be full 3D models that can be manipulated. AirBnb is actually being fairly subtle (small spinning animation on load) considering how over the top that could get, quickly. People have been doing small versions of this with 3D css transforms, but this is a step further. Inevitably these things are fashion, and big companies want to have just slightly unique experiences. Usually that means doing something hard that the average site will struggle to replicate for a while, be that squishy UX animations, elegant minimalism, now 3D.
• samgranieri 1y ago
  I actually liked the skeuomorphic UI that Apple had. I miss the aqua interface. Buttons as buttons and not text. And also, god help me, brushed metal.
• HellDunkel 1y ago
  Firstly- the airbnb redesign is still flat and minimal. Only the icon bar is different- but not in a good way. The design is too heavy, unclear and does a bad job adding to the rest. Of course the ceo is trying to paint the redesign in the best light possible but there is little reason for praise here.
• whytaka 1y ago
  "The best design is design that gets out of the way" as a maxim will probably hold. Users may state a preference for "delight" and claim to be delighted by maximally rich graphics but I doubt it'll move the needle as a business priority. As more AI slop pollute our digital consumption streams, my bet is that these attempts at simulacrum will quickly turn garish.
• evolve2k 1y ago
  I saw AirBNB’s current ad that’s all AI “aesthetic” and I figuratively puked in my mouth. We’ve reached corporate AI slops bleeds into design systems. Hard no from me.
• b3ing 1y ago
  Airbnb’s “redesign “ is half-baked or really 1/8th baked. It’s still mostly flat and colorless, textureless, they slapped 3 3D icons in it and made a big PR campaign out of it, as if they cured homelessness.
• soulofmischief 1y ago
  The new airbnb design is super cheugy and unbalanced. I would not have approved that pull request. There are so many issues with it that I'm not sure where to start. It's also incredibly obvious which UI elements are handled by different teams, as there seems to be zero coordination between them, invoking Conway's Law and thus painting the picture of an increasingly disorganized company.