Graphic Designers Have Always Loved Minimalism. But at What Cost?
eyeondesign.aiga.org
eyeondesign.aiga.org
While the team is still less than ~20 ppl, we likely won't have a full-time designer. With the ubiquity of tools like Figma and design libraries like Material Design, we actually think this is okay. You're welcome to hire an agency to help with things like colors, fonts, illustrations, and to audit our component library.
Agency? To help? May be more like "some freelancers and stock design templates". Good Lord. And then you have audacity to complain that "there is no design".
You're welcome to hire an agency to help with things like colors, fonts, illustrations, and to audit our component library.
I suspect someone like the GP could help with the other 90% of what graphic design is about, too, and the attitude implied here (whether it's your or the company's, again I'm not sure) is probably exactly what the GP is disappointed with.
Just an inside: Last year I have returned 5 offers to redesign "some product" from startups, because they have build it with this way of thinking and redesign implementation is not possible. They must rebuild the whole product from scratch with design focus.
Don't fall in this trap, to think that I have something "personal" and you must imply some wrongdoing. Please.
I was also having difficulty understanding the point you were making.
You've clarified that now though, so thank you.
After the follow-up, I think nbzso is arguing that good design does matter and can't just be retrofitted later, and in that case, we agree.
Edit: Also, I've just realised that both the top comment and the one I replied to were written by the same person, so actually it seems very clear that we're in agreement. Apologies for missing that before.
In some cases, however, it became clear that their design/aesthetics thinking was more important to them than user experience. For example, when we displayed prices on mobile devices, we did not include a CTA. My team persuaded them to conduct a simple A/B test on mobile with an arrow button next to prices. As a result, conversion increased by 10%. People simply did not realize they could continue to the next step by clicking on the price. The design team despised the button, but it enabled customers to complete their tasks on our website.
When you separate intellectual and practical processes you cannot crate meaning. Example of top of my head: Bauhaus revolution was possible because of practical approach towards design.
Designers that prefer aesthetic over product function are actually not professionals. Designers that have no insight in technical implementation are not capable to design properly. To design properly, one must rely on deep knowledge of classical principles and actual data.
P.S. This counter-argument sounds more like "management and communication" problem.
If one designs a car, one must know what is "packaging". If one designs for print, one must know the printing process. If one designs for UI, one must know the medium inside out. There is no generalisation. I can argue that todays UI designers have lack of design foundation, color theory, composition, typography and are producing colourful, non-functional garbage.
Example: The lack of contrast in mass adopted UI trends is not only aesthetically wrong but actually is an accessibility problem.
Why should frontend devs be not paid more than designers? Many frontend devs have dedicated significant numbers of years to become skilled professionals, just like you.
You can use design system for years to come and change front-end tech several times in this period. Todays front-end development is not like in 2008 when we used vanilla JS/Jquery/Ajax, there are tons of libraries and modularity in front-end development process. The low payment for designers is just tech founders devaluing the design process and the result is less qualified designers competing for what is left on the table (spoiler alert: it’s not too much).
As you can see from citation, the mentioned startup is not looking for a designer, because they are under 20 people. Design is not important, because in perceived from tech founders view - material design library will be enough:)
Don’t get me wrong. There are use cases for front-end development, when experienced developer can be critical for the business and bring immense value. I share my point of view, that if things go in current direction may be in near future design will be generated by neural nets on some “data proven” and “success guaranteed” methodology.
A good design badly implemented leads to a poor product.
> You can use design system for years to come and change front-end tech several times in this period.
> Todays front-end development is not like in 2008 when we used vanilla JS/Jquery/Ajax, there are tons of libraries and modularity in front-end development process.
> The low payment for designers is just tech founders devaluing the design process and the result is less qualified designers competing for what is left on the table (spoiler alert: it’s not too much).
Or it could be a realization by founders that design skills have commoditized enough that specialist designers do not provide enough incremental value.
If you hold the position that other parts of product development have commoditized with the advent of more libraries, it a strange to claim that design is immune to this change over time. The stance is especially peculiar because you also claim that the value of good design is its ability to be applicable for many years.
So, maybe in many domains all the good designs have been explored and consensus arrived at that paying high for a specialist designer is valuable to only handful of teams?
It could be, yes. Another possibility is that most founders have so little knowledge of good design and what it can do that most of them don't even consider whether it can be used to their advantage. I suspect there is some truth in both of these theories.
Some examples that come to mind immediately are Apple, Tesla and Ubiquiti, all of which have been successful despite entering established markets where huge incumbents had vast resources available to compete. That success came after the newcomers introduced more "designer" hardware products that offered slick user experiences, making the competition look old and clunky by comparison, and giving the newcomers enough of an edge to disrupt the market. Something else that is noticeable about all of those companies is that they have built extremely loyal customer bases, which have endured even when they've had problems with products and despite their relatively high prices.
It seems to be accepted wisdom among much of the startup community that a business like Apple is unique and there is no point trying to follow the same strategy because we can't all be Steve Jobs or Jony Ive. Maybe a few more founders should be asking, why not?
Some of the most successful sites on the Web have abysmal design and some of the most successful sites on the Web break all the time. And yet, despite those things, they remain among the most successful sites on the Web. Unless and until those of us who value quality can make it pay as a business model, we're always going to lose the argument. The hard thing to accept is that if we can't turn better quality into a competitive advantage, maybe we should be losing the argument.
"Another possibility is that most founders have so little knowledge of good design and what it can do that most of them don't even consider whether it can be used to their advantage. I suspect there is some truth in both of these theories."
Commoditisation of design elements is a chance for startups to hire qualified designer from the start. In hands of a good designer, commoditisation is a prototype tool, not final point of implementation.
The problem is that they are not willing to pay for "design", because they undervalue the work of designers and don't understand how critical is for their products in competitive market in which everyone uses the same UI libraries, the same "best practices", the same PM mantras.
The first hires will almost certainly need to be developers or salespeople. If you're looking for early funding, you need something to show potential investors and you need to know if you've found product-market fit. If it's a bootstrapped firm that isn't looking for outside investment, you need to bring money into the bank and establish a sustainable cash flow, and no amount of design will do that if you don't have something you can sell and someone to sell it.
So realistically, you're probably looking at bringing in specialist designers no earlier than the "second wave" of employees. At that point, you probably already have some sort of MVP and maybe a few further iterations. If a designer can't come in at that stage and effectively guide the existing product towards better usability and aesthetics, I think they're going to find opportunities for work are very sparse.
Then the question becomes, do all the commoditised toolkits and marketplace themes and colour scheme generators and icon packs do enough to make an early product useful before a "real" designer is involved? And I think obviously the answer is yes, because a lot of businesses have been doing that in recent years and it's worked for them. They're not ideal, but at that stage, they're good enough.
And so finally, I think the fundamental issue is about how a team building a new product without a dedicated designer can use those off-the-shelf tools and make something with good enough usability to be useful and attract business, while recognising that this is ideally a temporary situation and keeping everything as flexible as possible for the next stage of design when it starts to become more important and maybe they're starting to have team members with those specialist skills coming in to take responsibility for that aspect of the product. This is a subject that I see very little discussion about, compared to all the talk about one ready-made tool or another, or how an established design team might respond to different requirements later on.
Stop injecting race into everything and start looking at the bigger picture. Big tech corporations that don't give a fuck about you are driving these design movements.
Citation needed
And this has been a trend for a century or so, since Modernism. My apartment house in Prague, built 130 years ago, has a decorative (blacksmith-made) railings at the stairs. Today something like that would be ridiculously expensive, and it would never get made for an ordinary middle-class house.
They also generally took a fraction of the resources of an entire city for 2-8 centuries to build.
I think this is an interesting point. The cathedrals were built to last, which lessened the cost of all the art. Today things are built not to last, but to be consumed, and therefore it makes sense to omit expensive (and opinionated) design.
I wish open source would lead this way. Instead of emulating the commercial companies and trying to change graphics every couple years into minimalism, cumulatively build up more intricate (and visually interesting) design. It looked like this will happen by late 90s (with all the different graphic themes and such) but then it took a turn.
You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor.
https://despair.com/collections/demotivators/products/achiev...
Maybe it could be argued that it could be cheaper for a sweatshop that profits per artworks produced per second per designer however non-sweatshop made designs are also quite often minimalist.
And if I have an excuse to leave out fine pixel editing -- like because it makes me look high-class -- then I'll go for lazy! Hell yeah.
Designers love minimal designs because it makes their job easier, and it comes with free rationale attached, backed by Steve Jobs and Dieter Rahms themselves. It's a laziness that nobody can fire us for. We love it. We LOOOVE it.
Kidding aside, anyone looking at my site today can tell a) that I had no design skill when I set it up, and also b) that I sucked at picking Wordpress themes besides. I have some plans for that, but it's not really a high priority at the moment; other projects are interesting me more.
I mean I've got a DHL track&trace tab open and its icon looks like a red line in a yellow square, so they haven't designed a recognizable new logo yet for that use case. HN / YC's icon is much better in that regard. Github is also open and that too is quite recognizable.
edit: Ah, OK, found some prior art: https://www.drububu.com/tutorial/bitmap-to-vector.html
But those don't easily scale to different dpi and layout sizes. There are non-standard ways but nothing has taken over. So flat icons and solid colors it is.
For a long time, designers/artists might have produced several versions of the "same" icon at different sizes for use in different contexts. Sometimes you'd have a large area to work with, maybe 128x128 or 256x256 pixels. You could have a lot of detail at those sizes, in whatever visual style you liked. At smaller sizes, you didn't just scale down the large icon mechanically. Instead, you'd redraw it to preserve the essence but remove finer details and simplify the overall design as you had fewer pixels to work with.
A similar idea existed in type design. A comprehensive font family might include different "optical sizes". A caption font designed for use at small sizes might have lower stroke contrast, while a display font intended for use with large headlines might feature finely detailed serifs that wouldn't work well at small sizes. If you took the caption font at 8pt and the display font at 48pt and scaled them mechanically to be the same size, they'd look quite different.
In both cases, the advent of mechanically scalable image formats like SVGs and most digital font formats marked a change in common practice. Now you only needed one file to work at any size you wanted, but the subtlety I was talking about above is lost if you're no longer creatively adapting the same basic design for different contexts but instead you have to draw a kind of lowest common denominator that works tolerably at all sizes.
As others have observed, this shift certainly makes things cheaper, but potentially at the expense of quality of design. We only need to look at the bland, homogenous nature of sites built with flat design and its derivatives, not to mention all the obvious usability problems, to see that the popular approach right now isn't actually very good.
We have more stuff, but it's lower quality. Anything built to last is beyond what many can afford. And there are structural reasons why it doesn't make sense to buy built-to-last items: nobody repairs them any more. You could save money and buy one or two really good pairs of shoes, like your great-grandparents probably did. But cobblers and shoe repair shops are doing out.
Instead of saving a month's wages for a pair of shoes that would last many years, it's easier to spend a day's wages on something that will wear out within a year. Plus, of course, you might be able to buy several pairs in multiple styles! Woop! More variety, more sales, more landfill.
Fashion à la môde, indeed.
I think it's exactly the same with iron railings. It's similar with domestic appliances, most consumer goods, food, etc etc.
Simplicity done right is really about focusing on the core idea and removing anything not related to that. This can feel like a “minimalist aesthetic” which others attempt to copy but is actually something completely different.
Check out here to see some of it: https://hyperobjects.design/gallery/genuary-collection
Is that built with something like 3djs?
Code sample: https://workbench.hyperobjects.design/share/?script=5febbf46...
Do you have any links to other work, or are you primarily interested in what can be coded?
View -> Page Style -> No Style
document.body.classList.remove('preload');Goodbye.
So it is basically "you have to let us track you to read our content". /Bold move, let's see if it pays off…/
EDIT: NM, seems it is unrelated to tracking after all; just some spaghetti code that (presumably) attaches load event handler too late.
edit: well, outline.com gets at the prose, anyway https://outline.com/DRXrCu
This anti-pattern of loading your actual page content asynchronously needs to go away.
- It's easy to end up with something that looks unfinished, unintentional or lazy
- If you over-simplify, the design loses character, like the uniform sans style critiqued in the article
But consider good minimalist design like the Nike logo. When it's done well it can be amazingly timeless.
We are likely going to see a counter reaction. But this trend had lots of practical and technical reasons to exist - we needed very small icons and illustrations that would be readable even in small sizes, and we needed to produce more design using vector graphics tools.
The idea of blaming some company or another is easy thinking.
I work in the area and “flat” and “minimalism” are just ways to speed things up and make them more legible. This article just has an agenda.
“Design has always loved minimalism” isn’t even a true thing to say. There are plenty of designers particularly in the 90s who were maximalists - look at print design during this era, look at stuff from Paula Scher and look at any design mag from the 90s to see Photoshop insanity, distorted and cut up fonts. Lots of other eras had similar ideas - look at the 1950s illustrated magazine ads, the 1980s use of photography, Toulouse Latrec’s poster design.
But looking at magazine design in the 90s this was again a technical/practical design innovation - Photoshop and desktop publishing had become real alongside digital printing, so suddenly you had the opportunity to do anything and print anything. So the end result was an explosion in garish absurdity, some of it quite interesting.
Articles like this one are actually what will drive the shift towards adopting new art styles.
Good design strives towards a more engineering/problem solving approach - finding solutions to identified problems.
This is why the article is kinda whatever - design with ornamentation or doodads is not design.
Mood is a thing that design and ornamentation effects. It is a thing neglected by engineers and capitalists on the whole but it is important.
I don’t know where all the “capitalists” come in to the picture as that is a whole other matter.
The current aesthetics are derived from applying the following optimization functions:
- cost: cheap / simple / flat is preferred over elaborate / ornate / pleasant
- power relations: megacorps and their necessarily globalist lowest-common-denominator taste determine what artists/graphic designers/... produce, instead of the singular "soul in the game" creator
- maximal international compatibility of products and services, resulting in a loss of regional diversity and the emergence of interchangeable architecture
- centralisation & accumulation of bureaucratic rules, regulation & power, resulting in regulatory capture / zoning laws / a plethora of second order effects
- increasing credentialism, leading to more things becoming "academic" and thus eliminate craftsmanship and its culture - see the decline of architecture
- joint stock corporations and the principal/agent problems that necessarily come with them, due to decoupling profit from responsibility
In hindsight, the eyeballs act like an unintentional warning not to bother reading. And that's despite my agreeing with the initial premise that these flat rebrandings are getting way too common.
I mean it looks kinda nice at a first glance, but to people really like that?
the ideals of minimalism might be utilised at some stage of the design process, but most often they are quickly abandoned as complexity and scope increase.
I’m disappointed by the last decade of design.
For example, I play Factorio quite a bit now, and the UX is a pleasure. The graphic design itself plays only a small role in that, but all the traditional elements, like buttons easy to recognize, ability to have hotkeys, tooltips, highlights, etc. are there.
Is that minimal, or info-abundant?
You can learn a lot about wasps from the pictures I take of them, but the giant triptych of a hunting P. metricus forager that spans one wall of my living room doesn't convey the same meaning that a series of illustrations in an entomology textbook would.
There's a concept of perceptual qualia-density which has nothing to do with semantic density in the linguistic/narrative sense.
In that sense, I think my photos and the textbook illustrations must be even more different than I already considered them to be. The illustrations deliberately don't capture the qualia that elicited them; they are intentionally abstract, sacrificing most detail in order by contrast to highlight the specific aspects considered most useful to the student of whatever specific topic they illustrate. They're information-dense in that sense, but not in the one under discussion here. My photos [1] are just the opposite; not only are they not abstracted, I've put a fair amount of work into editing them - cropping, white balance, contrast, saturation, sharpening, fine HSL adjustment per-channel - precisely with the intent that they should represent as accurately as possible, not the assorted energies of photons which impinged on the camera's sensor and were sampled over the course of 4ms or however long, but what I saw as I watched a hunting animal and her prey through a machine which both magnified them considerably and (by dint of a rubber eye cup) blocked out all other light. Which, if I understand the philosophical concept correctly, makes the photos in that sense by far the richer in informational content of the two examples.
It might, anyway. There is a good deal that those photos don't capture, like the bright heat of the blazing June day on which I took them - the darkness of the backgrounds is an artifact of technique, rather than a true representation of the scene. Or, beyond that, the mix of lingering fear and burgeoning fascination I felt as I took the shots, with the lens objective six inches from the subjects, and their sisters and fellow foragers buzzing about my head and not minding me at all - it was in fact during the taking of these shots that I lost my previously lively fear of wasps, this change occasioned in part by the camera itself and the sense of emotional distance its presentation of images can impose upon its user. In this case, it was that distance - that sense that, whatever I saw through the machine, it did not involve me as it would if seen with bare eyes - that enabled me to approach in spite of fear, eventually close enough to take these shots and in so doing first recognize the beauty both of the hunting animals themselves, and of the singleminded, innocent ruthlessness with which they stalk, pursue, capture, and dispose of prey. When after a while I noticed I was in the middle of a small eccentric cloud of paper wasps, none of whom gave any sign even of noticing my presence save as a static obstacle to be avoided in flight, the last of my fear of wasps evaporated, and I haven't felt it again since. I think that more than anything else was what moved me to make of those raw images what I have, but I don't know how much that experience constitutes of their informational content, or how much that determination is even mine to make.
Ryoji Ikeda arguably uses "information" in his art pieces, but it's not like it is presented in a useful manner.
The point I was making was something can be dense but minimal, because to me, minimal is "systems" question. I chose an artist as an example, but perhaps that complicates the point because the artist's primary concern is not utility.
>Ikeda arguably uses "information" in his art pieces, but it's not like it is presented in a useful manner
Here's where interpreting Ikeda gets kinda fun. By the way, he very intentionally does not care about meaning. He wants us to decide. Most of his work is driven by real data sets, like human genome, CERN super collider data, digits of mathematical constants, every part from a Honda Civic, position of stars in the universe.
For non-experts, I think he uncovers the vastness of many systems that are difficult to visualize, allowing people to "experience" the efforts behind, e.g. encoding the human genome.
Of course, it's not useful in the sense of a tool or utility, but you might walk away with a new perspective on science, engineering, mathematics, that before was totally opaque to most people.
Good luck reading any of that.
Setting your font size to 9px or whatever is not how you increase information density.
That's just bad usability.
Or for something newer, Post-Modernism.
There's some other points about designers being white, male, and in one case racist and pedophilic; those really don't seem to go anywhere meaningful.
These minimalist redesigns are already getting boring. Designers may like minimalism, but they definitely do not like boring, and so they will find styles that are more interesting again.
It seems as if we will be relegated to a life of flat UIs that all feel the same for the foreseeable future, just due to vendor lock-in.