6 ms·

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 t

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.
vachina 1y ago
This is how you keep another generation of techbros fed and hired. Functionally, things have been stagnant for what felt like decades.
ben_w 1y ago
I look forward to the ultra-skeuomorphic future where our AR glasses deliver notifications rendered as fully realised Art Nouveau-era bellboys handing over telegrams.
- DemocracyFTW2 1y ago
  This already happened in R W Fassbinder's Welt am Draht (1973) where when you are visiting the hotel in the simulation and your time's over, a bell boy with a chalked notice on a portable blackboard will walk through the hall to alert you to answer the phone in a specific telephone booth. We had a future to look forward to!, and now it's come to this—flat interfaces.
- jayd16 1y ago
  Renders as dotmatrix printer paper out of your virtual fax machine.
DonHopkins 1y ago
I'm a big fan of the "Fukauffen Diamorph" school of design.
Vinnl 1y ago
Well, not sure if "the industry" is proposing this yet, or if it's just this one person and the Airbnb guy.
- PedroBatista 1y ago
  There have been rumblings and attempts years prior. Now it only takes another attempt, an industry darling ( it used to be Apple) and a big hype boom on the Internet. There is one problem tho: flat design is cheap to produce. Not sure if AI is there yet to be capable to produce good enough slop to become an industry trend that sticks.
  - soco 1y ago
    I'm not sure "good enough" was even a thing lately - all we do must be cheap while anything else is secondary. And AI can totally do cheap.
  - evilfred 1y ago
    Airbnb is an industry darling? in 2025? lol
DemocracyFTW2 1y ago
> shoving that ugly ass flat style down everyone's throat the correct term is ugly flat ass actually That and the other thing I hate / despair over is the monumental space they now leave between list items. In some applications I get scrolling drop-down menus because of that. Yes, they'll rather have users scrolling through a menu that doesn't fit on the screen rather than compressing space between items.
- soco 1y ago
  I think that comes from the horror period called "mobile first". Okay maybe I exaggerated a bit, not everybody called it horror. Some called it garbage.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
neepi 1y ago
This reminds me of something that happened to us recently. So one of the internal things we have is a giant turd that sits on top of some Oracle/SAP mess. The user interface is circa 2001 and hasn’t changed really. Looks like a cross between Motif and GTK1 it’s that bad. The icons are off the shelf ones from some clip art collection. So they need to rewrite it and got a consultancy to do it. The whole UI got rewritten using react and used an off the shelf flat design. A week after launch they sent out a user survey and nearly every respondent complained about the flat UI. So they made it look like the old one again very quickly. So now we have a shiny new React app that looks like something from 2001. I have to wonder if anyone likes flat user interfaces or just user studies are broken.
- williamdclt 1y ago
  They actually polled for user feedback, listened to it and acted on it quickly? That sounds like a great consultancy! TBH I’d guess that people would have complained whatever the new design was, people hate change. But yes, flat designs are often on the worse end of the spectrum
  - neepi 1y ago
    No we dug out a faculty statistician and did the analysis and paid them even more money to fuck it off. The consultancy resisted this horribly because the tech lead is a performative bullshitter and it doesn’t look good on his portfolio page that it looks like something from 2001.
    - michaelmrose 1y ago
      He should show both the prettier and the ugly version side by side and give it as an example of him being adaptable and willing to please his client instead of himself.
- mrweasel 1y ago
  > I have to wonder if anyone likes flat user interfaces or just user studies are broken. My impression was that it was an attempt to get engineers to be able to do the design, rather than involving graphic artists. I also think that we often conflate pretty with usable. There's nothing more interesting than these user interfaces that has grown organically for 20+ years. They look "bad" or at least old, but that doesn't mean that they necessarily have poor ergonomics. Some people, myself included, have tried to force that old-school, hodgepodge look, but you can't really do that either, it doesn't work. You just end up with ugly and confusing. Those interfaces has to evolve organically.
poulpy123 1y ago
I really prefer reasonably flat style UI (i.e. as long as the parts are easily differentiables) than the skeumorphic one.
- raincole 1y ago
  Flat design is great. I'd probably use my phone much less if apps started using a skeuomorphic menu icon (that resembles a physical menu in restaurant) than 3-dot or 3-bar. The problem is designers who take 'flat' as 'literally nothing indicating its interactivity.'
- a022311 1y ago
  I can't believe I had to scroll so much to find a positive comment about flat UI design. If it's disliked so much, we should have moved away from it ages ago. Yet, we are where we are and that means something. I personally like the current idea of "modern" UI, although it does tend to get too bloated at times. I generally prefer something minimal compared to old designs which weren't consistent, made heavy use of shadows and were pretty chaotic. Don't try to tell me old UI was playful (although as evidenced in the post, skeuomorphic UI _can_ be). The point about some interfaces' usability being hampered by flat UI is valid. Complicated applications full of buttons with single-color icons are very hard to navigate. I find this especially true for GTK apps where the design system enforces a very specific icon style. Example: Pinta was designed to be very close to paint.net, but due to its flat design, it is very hard to navigate. On the other hand, while paint.net may look a little outdated, the design is consistent and optimized for efficient workflows. I think the ideal design is somewhere in between flat and skeuomorphic. IMHO programs like Office and Inkscape make UI elements clear, while maintaining the ability for efficient workflows. Icons are simple, but a touch of color makes it trivial to distinguish between them. Not every UI design is perfect for everyone, but interfaces should be designed with different needs in mind. "Power users" most likely just need better keyboard support and care less about how the UI looks.
cainxinth 1y ago
This is broader than UX. Many trends are cyclical. So don’t throw out your skinny jeans!
- allears 1y ago
  Not a problem, I just bought a couple of new pairs. I lost a bunch of weight recently and can't resist showing off.
jerf 1y ago
It seems like there's a lot of people in this conversation on HN still operating on a dichotomy between "skeuomorphism" and "flat". But "skeuomorphism" really ought to be reserved for those UIs that have an excessively-strong physical metaphor, tied to the real world. That's a restricted set of interfaces. They've never really been that popular. It's not likely to make a "comeback" and it's debatable whether they were ever popular enough to be characterized as making a "comeback" at all. Both skeuomorphic UIs and flat UIs are particular points (or small regions) in a much vaster design space and we should not speak as if we are obligated to cycle between those two particular points, because it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's many, many, many options beyond those two.
- philistine 1y ago
  People are too hung up on the look of the interface when they talk about skeuomorphic design. It used to be that on iOS the bottom tabs would get indented when they were selected. That Z-axis intent, that apps would have even when they weren’t very skeuomorphic, that I hope it returns.
  - xnx 1y ago
    Having a physical material-ness like this is the founding principle of Google Material UI.
  - jerf 1y ago
    I kind of get that sense too. Sure, a "button" may be "skeuomorphic", but it's also a perfectly sensible graphical indication of a place that can be clicked, and only a small minority of "buttons" in the real world ever looked like a UI button. The UIs as a whole shouldn't be classified as "skeuomorphic". That generation of interfaces did a lot of other things that were only vaguely related to the real world... we have tabs, but tabs don't act like this. Looking up at my tab bar right now, they aren't even styled as "tabs", and nobody cares because that was never the core part of the appeal. Non-flat design had IMHO a much richer design language than flat design ever developed. Missing that design language and being forced into baby-speak for so much UI, when GUIs are already baby-speak themselves in so many ways (yes, the old UNIX hacker still sees the world this way) is very frustrating. Even just a couple of layer's worth of visual depth, that ".5D", is so very useful.
jayd16 1y ago
Icons are a small part of the flat design issues. I still don't see button borders and clear touchable sections in around these icons.
stitched2gethr 1y ago
I feel you, but cost is a real thing.

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.

vachina 1y ago

This is how you keep another generation of techbros fed and hired. Functionally, things have been stagnant for what felt like decades.

ben_w 1y ago

I look forward to the ultra-skeuomorphic future where our AR glasses deliver notifications rendered as fully realised Art Nouveau-era bellboys handing over telegrams.

DemocracyFTW2 1y ago
This already happened in R W Fassbinder's Welt am Draht (1973) where when you are visiting the hotel in the simulation and your time's over, a bell boy with a chalked notice on a portable blackboard will walk through the hall to alert you to answer the phone in a specific telephone booth. We had a future to look forward to!, and now it's come to this—flat interfaces.
jayd16 1y ago
Renders as dotmatrix printer paper out of your virtual fax machine.

DonHopkins 1y ago

I'm a big fan of the "Fukauffen Diamorph" school of design.

Vinnl 1y ago

Well, not sure if "the industry" is proposing this yet, or if it's just this one person and the Airbnb guy.

PedroBatista 1y ago
There have been rumblings and attempts years prior. Now it only takes another attempt, an industry darling ( it used to be Apple) and a big hype boom on the Internet. There is one problem tho: flat design is cheap to produce. Not sure if AI is there yet to be capable to produce good enough slop to become an industry trend that sticks.
- soco 1y ago
  I'm not sure "good enough" was even a thing lately - all we do must be cheap while anything else is secondary. And AI can totally do cheap.
- evilfred 1y ago
  Airbnb is an industry darling? in 2025? lol

DemocracyFTW2 1y ago

> shoving that ugly ass flat style down everyone's throat the correct term is ugly flat ass actually That and the other thing I hate / despair over is the monumental space they now leave between list items. In some applications I get scrolling drop-down menus because of that. Yes, they'll rather have users scrolling through a menu that doesn't fit on the screen rather than compressing space between items.

soco 1y ago
I think that comes from the horror period called "mobile first". Okay maybe I exaggerated a bit, not everybody called it horror. Some called it garbage.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

neepi 1y ago

This reminds me of something that happened to us recently. So one of the internal things we have is a giant turd that sits on top of some Oracle/SAP mess. The user interface is circa 2001 and hasn’t changed really. Looks like a cross between Motif and GTK1 it’s that bad. The icons are off the shelf ones from some clip art collection. So they need to rewrite it and got a consultancy to do it. The whole UI got rewritten using react and used an off the shelf flat design. A week after launch they sent out a user survey and nearly every respondent complained about the flat UI. So they made it look like the old one again very quickly. So now we have a shiny new React app that looks like something from 2001. I have to wonder if anyone likes flat user interfaces or just user studies are broken.

williamdclt 1y ago
They actually polled for user feedback, listened to it and acted on it quickly? That sounds like a great consultancy! TBH I’d guess that people would have complained whatever the new design was, people hate change. But yes, flat designs are often on the worse end of the spectrum
- neepi 1y ago
  No we dug out a faculty statistician and did the analysis and paid them even more money to fuck it off. The consultancy resisted this horribly because the tech lead is a performative bullshitter and it doesn’t look good on his portfolio page that it looks like something from 2001.
  - michaelmrose 1y ago
    He should show both the prettier and the ugly version side by side and give it as an example of him being adaptable and willing to please his client instead of himself.
mrweasel 1y ago
> I have to wonder if anyone likes flat user interfaces or just user studies are broken. My impression was that it was an attempt to get engineers to be able to do the design, rather than involving graphic artists. I also think that we often conflate pretty with usable. There's nothing more interesting than these user interfaces that has grown organically for 20+ years. They look "bad" or at least old, but that doesn't mean that they necessarily have poor ergonomics. Some people, myself included, have tried to force that old-school, hodgepodge look, but you can't really do that either, it doesn't work. You just end up with ugly and confusing. Those interfaces has to evolve organically.

poulpy123 1y ago

I really prefer reasonably flat style UI (i.e. as long as the parts are easily differentiables) than the skeumorphic one.

raincole 1y ago
Flat design is great. I'd probably use my phone much less if apps started using a skeuomorphic menu icon (that resembles a physical menu in restaurant) than 3-dot or 3-bar. The problem is designers who take 'flat' as 'literally nothing indicating its interactivity.'
a022311 1y ago
I can't believe I had to scroll so much to find a positive comment about flat UI design. If it's disliked so much, we should have moved away from it ages ago. Yet, we are where we are and that means something. I personally like the current idea of "modern" UI, although it does tend to get too bloated at times. I generally prefer something minimal compared to old designs which weren't consistent, made heavy use of shadows and were pretty chaotic. Don't try to tell me old UI was playful (although as evidenced in the post, skeuomorphic UI _can_ be). The point about some interfaces' usability being hampered by flat UI is valid. Complicated applications full of buttons with single-color icons are very hard to navigate. I find this especially true for GTK apps where the design system enforces a very specific icon style. Example: Pinta was designed to be very close to paint.net, but due to its flat design, it is very hard to navigate. On the other hand, while paint.net may look a little outdated, the design is consistent and optimized for efficient workflows. I think the ideal design is somewhere in between flat and skeuomorphic. IMHO programs like Office and Inkscape make UI elements clear, while maintaining the ability for efficient workflows. Icons are simple, but a touch of color makes it trivial to distinguish between them. Not every UI design is perfect for everyone, but interfaces should be designed with different needs in mind. "Power users" most likely just need better keyboard support and care less about how the UI looks.

cainxinth 1y ago

This is broader than UX. Many trends are cyclical. So don’t throw out your skinny jeans!

allears 1y ago
Not a problem, I just bought a couple of new pairs. I lost a bunch of weight recently and can't resist showing off.

jerf 1y ago

It seems like there's a lot of people in this conversation on HN still operating on a dichotomy between "skeuomorphism" and "flat". But "skeuomorphism" really ought to be reserved for those UIs that have an excessively-strong physical metaphor, tied to the real world. That's a restricted set of interfaces. They've never really been that popular. It's not likely to make a "comeback" and it's debatable whether they were ever popular enough to be characterized as making a "comeback" at all. Both skeuomorphic UIs and flat UIs are particular points (or small regions) in a much vaster design space and we should not speak as if we are obligated to cycle between those two particular points, because it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's many, many, many options beyond those two.

philistine 1y ago
People are too hung up on the look of the interface when they talk about skeuomorphic design. It used to be that on iOS the bottom tabs would get indented when they were selected. That Z-axis intent, that apps would have even when they weren’t very skeuomorphic, that I hope it returns.
- xnx 1y ago
  Having a physical material-ness like this is the founding principle of Google Material UI.
- jerf 1y ago
  I kind of get that sense too. Sure, a "button" may be "skeuomorphic", but it's also a perfectly sensible graphical indication of a place that can be clicked, and only a small minority of "buttons" in the real world ever looked like a UI button. The UIs as a whole shouldn't be classified as "skeuomorphic". That generation of interfaces did a lot of other things that were only vaguely related to the real world... we have tabs, but tabs don't act like this. Looking up at my tab bar right now, they aren't even styled as "tabs", and nobody cares because that was never the core part of the appeal. Non-flat design had IMHO a much richer design language than flat design ever developed. Missing that design language and being forced into baby-speak for so much UI, when GUIs are already baby-speak themselves in so many ways (yes, the old UNIX hacker still sees the world this way) is very frustrating. Even just a couple of layer's worth of visual depth, that ".5D", is so very useful.

jayd16 1y ago

Icons are a small part of the flat design issues. I still don't see button borders and clear touchable sections in around these icons.

stitched2gethr 1y ago

I feel you, but cost is a real thing.