Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1cvmask | Hacker News Reader

I could never understand the hatred of skeuomorphic design.

Material design seemed to me to add an unnecessary overhead to interaction especially with colors bleeding in. I love a strong, and arguably ugly, contrast ratio of 7:1

View on HN

It’s a generational change - much easier to make a career by discarding what came before rather than competing with it. You will see this in a lot of areas of society.

It's funny how a "generation" left Apple and suddenly they're rolling back all kinds of changes to how they were before that generation "made their mark".

It also gets a lot of emphasis because armchair ui architects think it’s cool to show they know this ‘big word’.

The Santa Claus effect by design makes everything made by “adults” obsolete.

One of the big factors in modern design is reducing cognitive load by reducing visual distractions. In other words, one goal of simple, clean, non-skeuomorphic designs is to make it easier to understand the interface. I’d be interested to see studies comparing good variants of skeuomorphic and minimal designs.

I wonder if the actual problem is that minimal designs are easier to get wrong. Skeuomorphic designs might be easier to get right just because you’re almost “cheating”: you don’t have to decide on the best way to represent X digitally. You just copy/paste X from the real world as best you can, and people will get it because they already know the IRL interface. As many users are very comfortable with touch interfaces now than 15 years ago, that’s less important.

Frankly, probably the only thing worse than the flat designs are the skeuomorphic designs. Bring back the Windows95-like. Give me edges, shadows and colours, all clearly indicating what the heck this bunch of pixels is meant to be. But without pretending it's a yellowing leather-bound notepad.

Same. I wonder how it would have fared in the world of Apple Pencil, where the feeling of literally writing notes on a yellow pad could have been extended out of the device and in to the world. I like the current stuff and think skeuomorphism ran it's course, but I never hated it and never understood why people did. Apple didn't even come up with it - remember Microsoft Bob? It was just a product of a time when computers had to be more friendly and feel like real stuff and not the other way around.

Skeuomorphic design simply doesn’t work. Turning knobs and dials on a touchscreen? It’s a three dimensional interface slapped on a 2d canvas.

Doesn’t work? The old Apple podcasts app worked just fine. It’s the modern one that breaks and has UI jumping all the time.

You can't judge the success or failure of ANYTHING by the podcasts app (except the podcasts app itself, of course).

Remember old QuickTime with wonky drawers and knobs everywhere? Everyone hated it, and rightly so, and switched to alternatives in every case where they could.

I really like the three “wheel” picker on iOS (used for dates, at least): for coarse changes, I “flick” the wheel a couple times and let “inertia” do its work, then I fine tune it when I’m close.

Sure but I still think shadows and 3 dimensions work.

It can work just fine, just like it can be applied inappropriately.

It all comes down to the fact that doing a skeuomorphic design is a lot more work than blurting a few colored rectangles.

It's also more confusing, distracting, and dated. Also super lazy. Good clean song is harder, but more enjoyable to use.

Let's come to a reasonable compromise: skeuomorphic is dated and material is super lazy.

I believe this is partially due to end of the "pixel perfect" era by introducing Retina displays. They did well both until iOS6 but they had limited variant of dpi for their devices. Now they have vary dpi iOS/iPadOS devices like Android.

I've never been a fan of skeuomorphic design. I'm sure there are good examples of it somewhere. My memories of early apple and iOS apps implementations with fake physical things e.g. desks or bookshelf's, rendered in the background and such made the app feel cheap and had less class. I felt this way even before skeuomorphic design started to become less fashionable.

Right, I think bad skeuomorphism incorporates textures whereas good skeuomorphism incorporates shadow, lighting, and depth

> made the app feel cheap and had less class

This is about usability and familiarity, not eye candy. "flat" stuff is way too abstract for many users thus the very definition of not inclusive design.

When (old and younger) people can't tell what your icon does because you decided to go "flat" at any cost, you failed as a designer.

flat is also boring has no personality. It's appropriate in some contexts (a web form), but not necessarily in others.

Trend and hype drove the change from skeuo to "everything is flat", this was never about good design.

"skeuomorphic" came into being as a scary label. We should prefer "realism" or something else

It's lazy, ugly, inefficient, unclear, and ugly to look at

Lazy? Unclear?

I would imagine it takes much more work to design something skeuomorphically than it would something flat. And clarity is the top priority - you should instantly know what the thing does upon seeing it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com