The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design
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* Not having this conversation with my mom (who, at 60+, is remarkably adept with computers but hey, we all run into trouble sometimes) over the phone anymore:
Me: Okay mom, now press the "Edit" button
Mom: Which one's the edit button?
Me: Uh, the... um, it's the one that kindda looks like... a bunch of lines in a rectangle, I guess?
Mom: Alex they all look like lines in a rectangle
* Not hovering everything for five minutes until I can figure out what I can click and what I can't click (for bonus points: not trying to click something for five minutes like an idiot, only to find out it's a label, not a disabled button)
* Buttons, tree views, tabs and all that having relief borders again, not necessarily because I like that, but because without it, the only way to "isolate" the information in them is using whitespace, and seven years of flat design hell later I can fit only slightly more content on my 1920x1080 screen than I could fit my Amiga's 1024x768 screen 20+ years ago.
* Being able to tell file types apart from each other when I'm browsing at minimum zoom level -- which is how you end up browsing any collection of more than a few dozen items or so
* Being able to tell application icons apart based on what's in the icons, not based on colours. People keep parroting this idea that "symbolic icons are easily to tell apart from each other because they're so simple" but when all icons are a letter or some anonymous symbol on a blob of colour, they all look the same when you put a few dozen of them next to each other. Maybe they're easy to tell apart when you have like four 128x128px icons but when you have 40 of them in a tiny dock at the bottom of your screen, the only useful information they retain is what colour they are.
I just dislike that it became so ubiquitous now and it's a train wreck on desktop
A condensed table in material design strikes a nice balance between whitespace and information density in my opinion. It's just sad that nobody uses it.
I'm also that person that has their DPI set to "small" on my phone though. I bought a phone with nearly 6 inches of screen diagonal and I could barely see any more information on it then on my old 3.5" phone from almost a decade ago. Cranked it down in the setting to just above the point where apps start displaying tablet UI on my phone and I've been very happy with it.
We need to take away design from artists and hand it back to specialised UI designers in my opinion. It'd make phones a lot easier to use.
The problem I see with abolishing material design is that a whole range of elderly people have now gotten used to it. Changing all the layouts for apps and websites would quickly lead to a disaster on the scale of Windows 8 for those who can barely grasp technology as it is. I'd much rather keep the waste of whitespace if I couldn't chat with my grandma otherwise.
For all its faults, the older styles of UI and icons made better use of screen space and conveyed much more information to the user. That should always have priority over a "designer" or "artist" imposing a "style" on the system. Any UI is meant to facilitate work, not create work in trying to understand whatever new trend.
It's quite an uphill struggle, but I've managed to salvage some better UI work from the past on my present GNU/Linux desktop (my loathing for flat and padded knows no bounds). But I'd prefer it if the user at least had the option of a coloured, 3d-textured UI in modern applications. Life itself is 3D, we should once again embrace that on the screen.
At least in good quality commercial software, I can assure you that a designer's primary concern is usability. Visual cohesion and hierarchy, the flow of the eye around the screen, determining what a user actually needs to see and interact with during a task, and moving unnecessary elements to different views are all valuable tools a designer has to make a program more usable. They aren't merely stylists imposing trendy visuals on otherwise entirely usable software, and are certainly not "artists."
However, open-source interfaces are sometimes created by inexperienced enthusiasts or developers trying to "make it look nice" rather than experienced designers. Projects often don't impose the same quality control for interface design decisions as they do for code design decisions. That might lead some "artists" or "designers" to do things that designers (sans-quotes) should be doing. Designers should be more involved in open-source projects and open-source projects should court design contributions and stop downplaying the importance of good interface design.
Most users simply don't share your tolerance (preference?) for visually crowded interfaces that aim to cram as many elements on a screen as you can possibly fit with little editing or regard for what users actually 'need' on a screen for a given task. Your citing old school Linux UIs as a high point in UI design is portrays a perspective that doesn't have a ton in common with a typical user.
But every new design also contains certain compromises, and also is found to has pain points that have not been anticipated.
So the cycle continues.
For example, would it be acceptable/comfortable for the designer to conclude "Everything is fine as is, we've done a pretty good job last time around, let's ship it like it is." ? If not that reflects a systemic bias to introduce changes in the name of changing.
I don't think anyone has a preference for needlessly crammed UIs. But the question is what you prioritise when a task really does benefit from seeing a lot of information at a glance.
There's an easy choice. There's a hard choice. And there's an ugly choice.
The easy choice is to "clean up" the interface and just remove stuff even if it makes the interface less useful. Apparently, that's a popular choice with designers. It can often be justified by pointing to "most users", because that creates a statistical bias toward less demanding requirements.
The hard (and expensive) choice is to think deeply about data visualisation, gain a detailed understanding of the task at hand to the point where the designer has to become a user themselves, and communicate with the most demanding users until you get something functional and not crammed or until you learn what customisation options are needed.
When the hard choice fails or isn't an option for economic reasons, that's when only ugly choices remain, and that's when I would rather have a developer who is intimately familiar with the task come up with a UI that is at least fit for purpose.
Not all coding is software design, and not arrangement of elements in an interface is interface design. If someone is taking an interface and making it "look nice" by removing beneficial components, then what they are doing is not design. Design is a process and a mentality, not a singular activity.
What you describe as the hard choice is merely a point (not even an extreme one) on the spectrum of what constitutes interface design. Broadly speaking, the first step, always, is to figure out what the user's goals are, to whatever extent possible. You might be able to do in-depth user research with focus groups and eye-tracking and put together user stories with A/B testing etc. etc. etc. You might only be able to do some personal research and play around with the software a bit and draw some diagrams. The second step is to figure out how you can help your users accomplish those goals most effectively through the arrangement and functionality of the on-screen elements. Without your primary concern being what the user actually needs, you're just decorating, or maybe organizing.
Reducing the amount of data on a screen isn't a end in itself. If it contributes to the user performing their task better, then great. If it inhibits it, it's the wrong choice. Any person with formal design training should be perfectly comfortable arranging a large amount of complex elements and information on a screen in a comprehensible way. See magazines, train timetables, newspapers, etc.
Try "Click that icon with the floppy disk to save." with a new user.
You can do a lot worse.
I’m only in my mid twenties and that even made me almost say “what the hell did you just say?” out loud.
That's true of virtually every graphical representation in a computer application. Save icon? How about folders? Where I'm from, folders (the physical item) never took off. Even today, we use a sort of slimmed-down binder for small collections of documents. For millions of people, myself included, the folders in Windows 95 and Windows 98 were the first ones we ever saw. That never prevented anyone from learning how to use them, or figuring out what the "Open..." button does.
So yeah, "Click the folder button to open" never worked, for the same reason -- no one had ever seen a folder. But the button was visually distinctive enough that you could say "click the yellow button in the toolbar, it's way up there on the left".
Very few icons are really globally unambiguous (and I still think designers in the early/mid-'90s really had the right idea when they just put the frickin' text next to, or below the damn icon). But making all icons look basically the same makes an already difficult situation even worse.
The folder metaphor helped me grasp what was going on. The first computers I spent significant time with were BBCs. They had two filesystems: DFS and ADFS (I think). The Advanced Disk Filing System had folders, but all the documentation I found called them "files". Files could point to files and make a tree of files. 11 year old me just gave up on this. Why would you want a tree of files? Why should a file link to a file...? Nonsense.
Folders (in Gem and Windows) made MUCH more sense. Aaah... it's for organising ideas. Bingo!
It was pretty stupid but it made sense on its own after a while.
In theory, an old "save" icon would look like a floppy disk (or perhaps a picture of a red tape-recorder "button") whereas a modern, flat "save" icon would be the word "SAVE".
In practice, if a button is labelled "SAVE", but in beautifully shaded and embossed typography, it too is "skeuomorphic", while some ugly disk-drive symbol, in the flat style of highway sign, is acceptably "flat".
A decade ago, most popular software did not abuse skeuomorphism. It was primarily great masses of iPhone crap apps, and four or five, widely talked-about, Scott Forstall iOS projects.
Like others in this thread are saying, I don't care much whether the software I use is "fun", but I do want it to be beautiful and intuitive. "Flat design" has been bad in that regard, and primarily as a reaction to a minority of apps looked like toasters or radios.
Are you bothered that “A” no longer means “cattle” because that is where it started.
In the original GUI interfaces you had a combination of icons where space was tight and menus with functions represented by words. That made a lot of sense when very few people had experience with how computers work. Now that more people are familiar with how they work it is not surprising that menus are de-emphasized.
Ironically, I think "bringing back the fun" is what destroyed flat design, because people who wanted to make their designs "fun" destroyed the design-language.
Overall, I don't care if you go flat or otherwise - I want the WP7 attitude in my software. The platform provides a rigid design-language, and the individual applications do not deviate from it. Unfortunately, web is fundamentally a platform designed for styled documents and not GUIs so we don't have that kind of standardization available, and the web is the center of modern design.
> The platform provides a rigid design-language, and the individual applications do not deviate from it
The problem here is twofold:
1. Apps actually deviate a lot from the guidelines for their platform. A lot of posts from grumpy.website et al. concern apps (even first-party ones!), not just websites. For instance, title bars that are undraggable/hidden/used as toolbars are a worrying trend.
2. The design language itself may be flawed, so following it blindly would result in a worse UX. (See: Material design and its weird, obnoxious floating button)
There’s precious little “new frontier” to chase for 2D screens design. Small touches like expanded drag, swipe, etc would be nice. Designing towards doing not fostering emotional attachment to design. The epistemology has come unhinged from its ontology for wankery of theory sake and here we are looking to escape it. It’s no longer serving the true purpose of the gadget, to do utilitarian work. We’re bored with flat and they need to keep us attached emotionally, so here’s our new season of designs!
I’d prefer we return to utilitarian UI of Win2k, OS9, so I can get a job done and not want to be “in love” with a screen
The entire interface is washed out. There's little to no distinction between selected items. Translucency breaks readability of text. And so on and so forth.
Some examples:
- https://twitter.com/krzyzanowskim/status/1275469783488696323
- https://twitter.com/lunasorcery/status/1275237073625198592
- https://twitter.com/Freerunnering/status/1275832747895009283
...and my problem with that argument is that high contrast mode looks aesthetically terrible. So basically, only people with great eyesight get to appreciate aesthetically-pleasing UIs.
Obviously, some people just have very bad eyesight, and there comes a point when you need to say "screw aesthetics, here's something you can actually see." But, the less people who need to resort to that, the better.
You're thinking only of Apple land, right? Most displays in the world are still 1366x768 and 1920x1080, and huge fonts and widgets everywhere is exactly what I'm not going to miss about this era.
I really like the way material addresses this : any clickable element should use the primary color of your app. This way, no guesswork. Button, switches, icons, links, they all use the same action color so if something uses it, you know it has to be clickable.
What Amiga did you have?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1200 :
> 800×600i, 1024×768i (not officially supported)
HighGFX was actually popular (and useful) enough that it caused a bunch of "flickerfixer" hardware to sprout in the mid/late 90s but I've never used/seen one.
It's really hard explaining to my grandma what's tappable on her iPad when everything's not just flat, but buttons aren't even marked in a way that suggests you can interact with them.
Sure, fashion played a role, but in this case the main driver was the need to support devices of different resolutions. Scalability implies vectors, which implies shapes, fills, and strokes rather than bitmap assets.
As a designer who made "skeuomorphic" interfaces before the shift, supporting even a couple of different device sizes with hundreds of different PNG slices had already gotten unsustainable by 2010, and moving to a vector-based workflow was a breath of fresh air.
The pendulum did swing a little too far: some of the early human interface guidelines were wary of the concept of lighting (gradients and shadows). But, realistically, that was unworkable, and those guidelines changed because nobody followed them.
"Flat design" as a moment was actually pretty short. Later iterations on the concepts explored during that moment, such as Material, were actually thoughtful and workable, in my opinion.
Someone needs to go out and patent using multiple ambient light sensors to detect where light sources are relative to a screen, then shade skeuomorphic elements accordingly.
Maybe someone can help...
Now that was an interesting UI.
https://www.mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html?utm_sourc...
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Burg_Rhe...
In northern Nassau County, there's all these 100+-year-old mansions, on a gazillion acres.
Even though they are often owned by people that can afford the upkeep ("old money"), they tend to get sold or donated to the county or state.
There's a few great museums:
https://www.oldwestburygardens.org
and a few in Suffolk, as well:
https://bayardcuttingarboretum.com
https://www.vanderbiltmuseum.org
They are a pretty big pain to keep up. There's also a couple that have been abandoned, because the owners couldn't give them away.
He had a blog that he did not update after a while. This blog's web address is now being used for some sort of penis enhancement service, which I find rather bizarre.
It was horrible.
Designers: Apple's done it again, Time to adopt neomorphism in our apps and the web, like we did with flat design and skeuomorphism.
Me: About this battery...[0]
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/23/macos-big-sur-battery-h...
Do designers consider how expensive the gpu rendering is for skeumomorphism or neuromorphism?
The design trend require soft shadows to be rendered on many elements in layers which I exaggeratedly pointed out. I apologise.
But "fun"? No thank you. All that cutesy crap they used to have was distracting. There was no consistency at all. Yellow lined paper as the notebook background? Winking emoji? UI elements that change size? A color palette chosen by a toddler on LSD? This new "fun" is an unwelcome reversion.
Apple finally dropped their misguided cuteness in hardware design and ditched all the rounded corners and pastel colors. Are they going to undo that too?
You don't like kawaii. Fun is just that, it's fun. It doesn't make you say awww, but it does tug at the corner of your mouth. It makes you want to use what your using and do it again.
But it shouldn't come at the expense of experience or speed. Slow is rarely fun.
I’ll agree with you there. They went to every possible length to completely remove anything skeuomorphic, which made it much more difficult to determine the function of UI elements. There were very few relatable curs from the real world and everyday experience to help.
I believe that Google’s Material Design is the best at balancing “digital authenticity” with physical cues. And the chief insight is that lighting and surfaces are really important in everyday human experience for determining what things are and what they do. (And we determine what is a surface primarily based on lighting. It’s really all about lighting.) Material buttons, for example, look pressable, because they are raised, which you can infer based on the shadow they cast. But! They don’t look like a picture of a button from reality. That’s the difference. It’s not trying to perfectly emulate a button - it’s just trying to draw on subtle cues that humans use to identify buttons.
> But “fun”? No thank you.
That’s subjective. But in some cases I think you’re confusing fun with extreme skeuomorphism. The lined paper, for example, is so skeuomorphic, that it relies on making the entire application looking almost like a picture of a real pad of paper on your desk instead of using subtle cues to indicate the purpose of the application. The photorealistic objects in the new app icons, however, are not necessary for indicating the purpose of the app. They’re there because they’re rich, complex, and easy on the eyes - AKA “fun” - in the way that a painting is fun. You could easily draw stick figures to show what you mean, but a painting is rich with detail, color, and emotion. If you don’t want a sense of artistry in your desktop environment, you could use Linux with a lightweight desktop. Many of them are perfectly dry, sterile, and utilitarian. Most people, however, do have an aesthetic sense, and enjoy some kind of artistic touch. That’s why car sales are predominantly based on design aesthetic.
> Apple finally dropped their misguided cuteness in hardware design and ditched all the rounded corners and pastel colors. Are they going to undo that too?
I doubt it. There’s a difference between “fun” and “toyish” - what you call “cuteness.” I would argue that the physical aspects of Apple products are fun today without looking like toys. They used to look like toys. The bubbly appearance with pastel colors gave them a childish quality. New Apple hardware is a pleasure to behold, but not childish. I think that same intention is clear with the high-fidelity pen rendering in the new icon shown in the article. It’s not a crayon or a calligraphy pen. It looks like a Bauhaus design. It’s a utilitarian pen that an adult would use. It enriches and beautifies the icon without being toyish. The messages icon, on the other hand, was less expertly executed, I think. How do you add a sense of beauty and richness to a chat bubble? I would argue that you don’t. It’s too simple of a shape/object to try to do that with. It ends up looking like a balloon. They should rethink it. And the battery icon that everyone hates is obviously a mess. That needs to be rethought for sure.
Everyone is too concerned with the pendulum swing. When a pendulum swings, it never moves all the way back to its starting point. In this case, Apple started with full-on skeuomorphism and swung completely in the opposite direction - completely devoid of any kind of physicality to their design. And now the pendulum is swinging back, but will not go back to total skeuomorphism. What we’re seeing now is a refinement. A better balance between the two philosophies. An understanding that physical cues are helpful without needing to make the whole UI look photorealistic. And and acknowledgment that playing with light and photorealism with restraint can be pleasing.
I like this direction, even if there are a handful of missteps.
Never as much as Android in my opinion. Android went beyond flatness to complete abstractness, all in the name of "minimalism". The square/circle/triangle design decision was the most baffling example.
There seems to be no such concept as "good enough."
Change is fun.
Being stuck with the same aesthetics for much longer than 5 years sounds like a special circle of Hell.
So this particular quirk of thinking in groups doesn't seem to be confined to the design domain. Nor do "swings of pendulum" preclude the pendulum also having some forward momentum in sum.
Think of it as a skier's waving, or a sailboat crossing against the wind, and the sideways motions is actually required for any forward motion to happen.
Same with beginner/new projects embracing dynamic programming. It’s perfect for a new code add. It bites only later; when the enthusiasm has died off and you got to keep the codebase and tests up to date and things start slipping here and there.
Go is a darling now because it’s constraining. It skipped passed the last three decades of advancement in languages like they never happened. And then as it becomes way more popular people will ask for the same set of features that other languages have had forever.
Things change. Deal with it.
And yet, things don’t have to change at an indigestible rate. Windows, for example, is changing so fast lately, that directions for use change on a semi-annual basis, and self-consistency is almost entirely gone. They never release a finished product, and It creates highly unnecessary cognitive burden.
So someone comes up with a new technology and says "Look! It fixes all the problems of Technology A!" And people who are new enough to the field who pretty much only have experience with Technology A think it's great, because this new thing fixes A's problems.
Meanwhile, though, Technology B has its own host of problems, and oftentimes those kinds of problems are the ones Technology A was originally created to fix! And so the pendulum swings until you get enough years behind you on Technology B where it's problems become apparent enough, so someone comes up with Technology C, which is basically Technology A with more modern trappings.
Whenever you make a technology switch, be very cognizant about what you're losing as well as what you're gaining.
For a moment in time, "good enough" exists. But in a dynamic world we should probably accept that "good enough" is ephemeral.
I don’t think that concept has had any meaning since the Industrial Revolution. Capitalism is built upon the belief that nothing is ever good enough.
You will never see “good enough” in consumer goods in a capitalistic society.
It's human nature to judge by superficial attributes. If you have a perfectly good UI but it never changes, it gives people the feeling that your software is stagnant and out of date.
It's inconvenient for the user, but it catches the user's attention and makes them think about the software. Essentially it boosts brand awareness. It's the same reason that they change the design on a box of granola bars and write "new look, same great taste!" on it.
It also costs engineering / designer labor. And there's a danger of replacing the old design with a newer one that doesn't work as well. The people making these decisions probably know that but think it's worth the cost anyway.
- Not using shadows and lines to separate panels, and using solid color blocking or whitespace instead is much more confining, design-wise, and greatly limits possible information density. Sure, all that whitespace looks great in presentations, but it's like the difference between a designer kitchen from a magazine and a place where I can actually cook.
- Panels that are raised up or recessed using shading provide an obvious hierarchy, giving users valuable cues as to the relation of the elements. With shading and depth, it's obvious that items in this toolbar affect the items in this panel below it, one is subservient to the other. With color blocking, it's all just rectangles next to each other.
- Buttons that are slightly raised up have an affordance for clicking, and there's no way in hell you can confuse them for a label - it's much easier to overlook that 'the label with blue text' is actually a button, while the label with black text is just a label.
- Ostensibly, a flat design contains fewer distractions. But ironically, in reality, a human brain may have a much harder time understanding an interface when everything is flat and looks alike, than when elements have depth and distinctness to them. More information communicated does not always translate into more cognitive load in processing it - often the opposite is true.
Sure, I understand the urge to rebel against skeomorphism (that faux-leather in the iOS Find my Friends app was an abomination) but they threw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm glad to see a lot of these changes being slowly walked back with successive versions of iOS - in the linked article the comparison between the "tabs" (segmented control) in iOS 12 and 13 really showcases how a shaded design can look both less distracting and convey more information than a dogmatically flat design.
I don't think people are able to distinguish between what's new and old anymore. Aesthetics will finally be free from corporate trend setting and maybe we'll feel comfortable doing our own thing.
On Apple systems, as long as you’re using the native frameworks, the framework itself handles a lot more of the visual update.
Both methods have their pros and cons, but you’re less likely to see an aesthetic divergence on iOS/macOS
The difference with Apple is that they finish their work, and the pace of change is much slower.
aka google PM syndrome
I don't think if buttons are flat or lickable or shiny or bezeled or oozing pus-filled nodules. As long as every button has the same styling as every other button and nothing that isn't clickable has that styling? I'm happy.
Pick something and stick to it.
And people who want "fun" designs can go work on their blog.
This is weird because the cert is issued by CloudFlare, who probably shouldn't fail TLS negotiation just because the backend is unresponsive. Very strange.
I'd still take iOS 6 design any day for iOS.
Snow Leopard and iOS6 were their OS' peak.
All that hype around "flat" was just that, hype. Design needs texture and depth, these are just core concepts of design. Doing away with texture or depth because somebody in the silicon valley decided it was outdated means that all these designers that jumped into the "flat bandwagon" didn't even understand what their job was about: not following trends but ACTUALLY designing for a public.
I used to feel the same about iOS but if you search screenshots of it now at least to me it really didn't stand the test of time.
People forget but the reason this minimalist design travesty happened was political: Steve Jobs was no longer around, he had fired Scott Forstall because of the bungled Maps fiasco, and he promoted Jony Ive, the hardware minimalist who wanted to Bauhaus all the things.
This is what I wrote in 2016, if Steve Jobs still ran Apple: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234
Look, we may not need skeumorphism, but we need shadows. We need to know what is part of the chrome interface and what’s part of the documents. When I was a kid I joined the Apple Human Interface developers usenet group (anyone remember those?) They used to be religiously against hidden modes (interface modes which could not be discovered and navigated to by straightforward visual inspection). Apple computers used to be easy to use for precisely guidelines like these, which they proudly published. Heck, they even proudly touted the small size of their phones for ease of access, which I agreed with:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Af0gtsjfy7E
They became hypocrites and trend-followers when they abandoned all these things. Microsoft started the flat trend (and Woz praised them for it). Android phones became “phablets” (which Steve Jobs derided). Apple became a follower and didn’t even bother remembering what they claimed was the best way, just a year earlier.
But then again, of course, Apple always did this even under Steve - claiming RISC processors were far better and next year claiming Intel was better after they switched. Claiming they invented the Omnibox in Safari years after Chrome did.
But at least I am happy to see some of Apple’s original DNA coming back.
You may want to install a spam filter on that comment section, or just disable it.
“Affordance” is the term you’re looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance#As_perceived_action...
> Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. We need both.
In 1955, the auto industry caught up with the pent-up demand from WWII. Suddenly, making cars wasn't enough. Now they had to convince people to replace their old car even though it still ran. That's when auto styling became exuberant. All the automakers had tailfins. Big tailfins.
Peak tailfin was reached in the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado. Tailfins then shrank, until by 1965, they were completely gone.
Tailfins are what you do when you have no clue how to improve the product. By 1955, car engines had enough power, automatic transmissions and power brakes worked, suspensions were smooth, and air conditioning was available. Getting from point A to point B comfortably was pretty much solved. Solutions to the hard problems in fuel economy, safety, reliability, and handling were not yet available for production cars. So chrome and tailfins dominated.
Material design almost gets it right. A bit more visual distinction between interactable and non-interactable elements and I'd be happy.
However, I will miss the distinct outline shapes and silhouettes which have made macOS icons easy to distinguish from each other since the original Mac (really earlier than that, going back to the Lisa and Xerox Alto.) Now everything's going to be an iPhone home-screen RoundRect.
Consider these distinctive silhouettes of Super Smash Bros. fighters: https://www.sporcle.com/games/skuban/super-smash-bros-charac...
Or the silhouettes from Apple's iconic iPod ads: https://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/ipod-silhouettes-2000-2...
I use kde nowadays and the amount of customization is awesome.
I am using chrome OS theme with tela icon pack and a cool ass animated mouse pack. And its frankly awesome.
I feel like Apple is stagnating.
A recent example was some web view showing a change log that respected the font color settings but not the background, resulting in white-on-white text with my dark UI.
I'm probably far more willing to spend time on such issues. But I never got to a place where I felt I was "done". In that sense, Linux only demonstrates the difficulty of UI choices, and how it may not be possible to leave it to users. Hell, it's not even possible, apparently, to leave to application developers, judging by the state of the non-customized Linux desktop. Design may be a creative endeavour that requires a competent dictator, and cannot be done in the bazaar-model of OSS.
(That, of course, is on top of the rather large number of flaws of any given Linux UI. Seriously: after reading much praise and endless criticism of MacOS here on HN, I gave (K)Ubuntu another shot. And the only possible conclusion is that Apple and Linux are measured on widely different scales.)
+1
They are simply designed for different end users - and that is fine. I used macOS for ~5 years before getting fed up with the limited window management - but I understand why it is that way - most people don't care. So people who do, can just use KDE et al, peace.
This would be a terrible idea.
People complain (in the comments on this very page) that Apple’s professional designers do a terrible job. You think my uncle is going to do better?
Yes he will, because he has to only care about what he needs, and he is the best judge of that.
The jaded old fart SW dev in me tells you:
No, he most certainly isn't.
Sure as hell Apple will not allow too much customization, but they could do the designs themselves and give users a bit more choice.
Beyond that, you quickly get to a point where whole layouts would have to change. Doing so, across three to five platforms, would be a major undertaking for Apple itself. And app developers would never be able to consistently support multiple design paradigms, leading to a fractured experience.
The main reason I love iOS and macOS is the consistency in the interface because majority of apps follows the same HIG provided by Apple.
Windows is a mess between various interfaces from various eras of Windows and I dislike it. I don't want to figure things out, the app should just work consistently for me. Even today, various distros are struggling to make sure various GTK/QT/etc apps are themed the same way when you change their theme settings (they're getting better with client side decorations).
I used to play with themes and hacks on Windows, I almost always go back to default because in the long run, it just got boring after a few months and it was annoying. I want consistency and stability more than customization. Even on Pop!_OS I use on my Thinkpad; I've tried various themes and WDM, I just gave up and left it at default, it's fine. The only tweak I need is font scaling to make HiDPI work better.
I know that it could do things like apply a "steampunk" theme, where all the scrollbars turned into brass poles, with green leather handles for the thumb button.
Some of the themes were vomit-inducing (most of them, actually), but it did have a couple of great ones.
/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources
However, I also believe that the Bauhaus way of using flat designs with interesting shapes and motion will be an interesting path forward
Likewise for Bauhaus design - also a century old.
There are hints of a new generative aesthetic - busy in an unhierarchical repeated-elements kind of way, with organic influences - but that's better suited to architecture and sculpture than commercial design.
There probably won't be a completely original design language until AR/VR become ubiquitous - which will take a while.
One of the major criticisms is that over time they cause even experienced users to become hesitant and uncertain.[1]
That right there should have been enough to squash flat design.
[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design-long-exposure/
>Some of them depict physical objects in a style that can only really be called skeuomorphic
No, this style cannot really be called skeuomorphic. You cannot have "skeuomorphic" icons. Neither etymologically or semantically.
Skeuomorphic etymological comes from Greek for "appliance like".
And semantically it's about GUIs (key distinction: GUIs, not icons or images) emulating real world objects.
A movie player interface that looks like a real-world DVD player is a skeuomorphic UI.
A movie player icon that looks like a TV set, or a Dick Utility icon with a hard drive and a pair stethoscope are not "skeuomorphic".
They are merely life-like depictions.
Same way, if an icon for my "Horse" app (say, a note taking app) is a realistically rendered horse, that's not "skeuomorphism". That's just an icon with a plain old "realism" painting/rendering of a horse.
Ultimately, the context matters a lot. Not to mention the app, target users, complexity of the app, and what not.
But I really hated those flat, borderless 'buttons' in earlier iOS versions.
That's just stupid design. It's minimal for sure, but functionally.
Apple has always had some from of Skeuomorphic in their design since its early days. It was what Steve wanted it to be. Apple felt that flatness were wrong right after iOS 7 was released. An every year since then they have been "walking back" those "changes".
Everything Ive changed all reverted back to Steve Jobs' era. Scott Forstall wouldn't have left. Their Head of UI wouldn't have left. Apple Store changed in design and layout, ( You could argued whether those are from Angela or Jony ) some of them are reverted back. Apple's Keyboard to literally no key travel, reverted back to 1mm but still very shallow to the old 1.5mm. A large part of Apple has spend a half a decade fixing their wrong directional changes.
I really miss Steve Jobs.
Due to its reliability problems ( which may not have anything to do with the lower key depth ) Apple walked back on the design and uses a 1 mm Key travel "Magic Keyboard". And from my experience it is pretty much the same as the old Butterfly keyboard in terms of Typing experience.
consumers don't give a shit about consistency. they want fun
Three examples: Enlarge the network icon for a Windows, or unknown computer, and you'll see the monitor has a BSOD on it.
Enlarge the icon for Mail and you'll see the postmark on the stamp reads, "Hello From California."
Enlarge the icon for Pages, and there's a fun little travelogue.
There used to be an Apple program that had the famous "Misfits" text on it. I thought it was TextEdit, but it doesn't seem to be there anymore.
With Apple’s flat design, you can’t even tell that buttons are buttons. They just look like labels.
Because UI trends can come in and out of fashion but hoodies and T's are for life I get it.
Any ex-military in this thread understand the importance of dressing up to pass muster?
Ok. I'll concede the hoodie has some utility for beach culture but in the office? C'mon.
Regrettably, nobody knows how it works or which buttons do what... but it makes up for it with soothing beeps and clicks.
I pulled out a ruler and they have flat sides, so — round rects are everywhere!
- I miss the old copy and paste UI that Apple originally had on iOS. The magnifying glass worked so well. Now we have the "pure" design where you just drag the cursor. This is partially obscured by your finger and it can be so difficult to get that cursor between narrow letters (like "i" and "l", mainly because they're sans serif pretty much always). If you overshoot you can backspace and type in. If you go too far to the left you have to repeat the whole process. It's just dumb.
- Face ID is so dumb, I miss Touch ID. I get you want to have the full front face for the screen. Do what Samsung did and put a sensor on the back. Apple argues there are too many false positives on Touch ID. I don't care about that. I do however care about all the false negatives on Face ID.
- Let me control security. 5 failures of Face ID = a prompt for your PIN code. I don't want this but I can't change it. Because of all the false negatives I have to enter my PIN code way too often;
- Swipe up is a terrible replacement to the Home button. Again, this is all in the name of screen real estate. I've heard it says that design is the art of compromise. What made the Macbook Air amazing was that it was the "correct" compromise. Fast forward to Johnny Ive's war on thickness and you have the disaster that was the 12" Macbook. That's what happen when you optimize for one thing only to the extreme. So for the edge-to-edge screen we have this swipe up nonsense. Why is it bad? Because which way you swipe depends on which way the app is oriented. Some don't change orientation with the phone so it's a side swipe "up". Some do but the trigger to change orientation fails for some reason. The gestures to get to app selection (with a weird swipe up and right) are strictly worse than a double press of the Home button;
- I swear swiping for text entry continues to get worse. As one example, if you try and swipe something and get, say, "Rome" instead of "tome", you now have a capitalized word. Delete it and swipe in "tome" and it'll appear as "Tome" because obviously you meant to keep capitalization even though you never chose capitalization in the first place.
- Often the keyboard will end up obscuring my messages, like iMessage fails to account for it being there so I have to dismiss it and open it again and it'll scroll up like it should've done. This bug has been around for months;
- Flat design is stupid. The pendulum has swung too far from skeuomorphic design. The whole point of the old design was to give affordances to prompt user behaviour. The designers have gone insane and completely thrown out this key element of UI/UX design.
So before we think about "fun" how about we first tick off "functional"?
We had great UI, then tech branched out and we need to redo every UI continuously so the marketing people (who mostly also don't belong in tech) can boast of new and improved this and that. It's all so tiresome.
And as to Ive, he cannot even claim to have originated flat design, it was a slavish imitation of Microsoft and Google's design.