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Comment by dhruvarora013 | Hacker News Reader

This website seems to go out of its way to have an unfriendly design. The sharp yellows, the highlighting of singular characters in words in a different color.

Snap Design makes simple things complex.

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It’s been dubbed “digital brutalist” [1] style; as a rejection of the “streamlined, flat” designs of the last decade. Style evolves; Snap is targeting a younger demographic and the best way to say “we’re not Facebook or google; we’re cooler” is to reject all their design principles.

[1] https://envato.com/blog/brutalism-ugly-web-design-trend-taki...

> Snap is targeting a younger demographic

The design makes it look more like they are targeting a demographic nostalgic for the worst of late 1990s design atrocities.

Member of the younger demographic here. It happens that many of us adore late 1990s design atrocities.

Not sure I'd use that particular visual language in an enterprise website, but I think the reasoning is valid.

ah then you guys would have loved my home page back in 1998. Pretty sure I used this exact color scheme, although I think I had a really horrible logo in there too.

In fairness, in 1998 the people designing sites were the "younger generation"

Design is cyclical in about 30 year cycles. Grunge is back in. Everything ugly is beautiful again.

> Grunge is back in.

Keep it.

I recently learned Doc Martens boots are fashionable again. Makes me regret throwing my pair away in the 90s. Yes, I'm old. But at least back then they were all made in Great Britain.

Jesus, I remembered my Dad saying the same thing in the 90s about his boots from the 60s.

Yep; docs, ripped jeans and flannel are all really fashionable right now. Feels like high school.

Fashion moves reliably in cycles of twenty years. It's entirely expected that 1998's visual styling looks fresh again in 2018, always filtered through an ironic-nostalgic lens of varying density.

> Fashion moves reliably in cycles of twenty years. It's entirely expected that 1998's visual styling looks fresh again in 2018,

But it's 1998s bad amateur design, which didn't look fresh in 1998, either.

To me, the Yellow site doesn't really look like an old website at all because HTML's creative possibilities have changed — typography, layout options, etc.

However it does look like a lot like print design from circa 1994-98. Wide font variants for all copy, strong contrast with primary colors, and so on.

It looks like garbage.

I wish they were true to the cause, and used black on white, the most brutalist anything could ever be.

People keep on misusing "brutalist". This isn't brutalist whatsoever, it's anti-design. [1]

[1]: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/brutalism-antidesign/

This is what I would expect from trying to navigate the ridiculous UI in Snapchat. It seems to be obtuse and non-intuitive on purpose.

> ...the highlighting of singular characters in words in a different color.

In case it wasn't obvious they've highlighted the letters for "Yellow".

Also an _inaccessible_ design. Yellow text on a black background creates a contrast which a whole swathe of people can't read.

And what's up with the highlighting of (to me) seemingly random characters?

It spells out Yellow, if you read the highlighted characters in order.

If you look really carefully, you'll notice the highlighted chars make up the word "yellow".

Such design. Much wow.

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