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Comment by crocodiletears | Hacker News Reader

From the screenshot:

I absolutely adore the positioning of the table of contents. The design looks clean, utilitarian, and overall well executed.

That being said - and this is more a critique of modern design - I absolutely hate the suffocating roundness of the element corners. It's an aesthetic that drips with overfamiliarity and a patronizing attitude. It's the visual equivalent of being put in a padded room, or having a distant relative who you have nothing in common with and have not seen in years trying to relate to you with anecdotes about your childhood that you can scarcely remember.

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That's, uh, a pretty intense reaction to some curves.

There is a long history of rounded corners in graphic design. In the real world, perfectly sharp edges do not exist. Even on the printed page, ink bleed tends to gently round all corners.

This is a good thing, because sharp corners interact poorly with some parts of our visual system. Sharp corners in a design can be as jarring as extremely high contrast or saturated colors, which are also best avoided in designs where the intent is to let the viewer focus on the content and not the form.

A slight amount of corner rounding in digital graphic design can lead to a look that is easier on the eyes, less distracting, and more approachable. (The design here uses more rounding than necessary, but I think it's driven largely by fashion and the above principles and not some dystopian desire to infantilize you.)

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_illusion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_inhibition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_glare

http://people.sunyit.edu/~lepres/thesis/principles/63_pdfsam...

http://macknik.neuralcorrelate.com/pdf/articles/troncoso_et_...

I'm absolutely an advocate for corners that are rounded to a reasonable degree. As you stated, perfectly sharp corners can produce a harsh, inorganic aesthetic that can be distracting to users.

Even very round corners can be contextually appropriate.

There's a world of difference between a few pixels of roundness, and making your entire website look like a fisher-price toy.

Round, organic designs can be complex and visually pleasing. They take a lot of work to execute well, and are rarely confined to the simple rectangles that dominate modern interface design.

The large border radius on modern UIs doesn't contribute anything interesting to previous UX other than the novelty of round corners. It hasn't been motivated, or motivated any meaningful new design approaches. All it's accomplished is that it's turned UI elements into rectangular pills that function almost exactly as they did before.

I see it as an aesthetic reflection of the modern technologist's attitude towards their user-bases.

Edit:some grammar

I agree with you on this 100%.

Have you seen Android 12's new fisher-price UI? I would really love to hear your thoughts on this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xLgXIhebxA

As a person who designs web applications to look somewhat modern because that's what is now-days expected, whenever critics go to such extreme similes about modern web design and their hatred for it... it's such an extreme opinion I tune them out entirely. You can't cater to radicals.

Most people don't particularly care how things look, so long as they're reasonably familiar, well-ordered, visually inoffensive, and functional. After that, it's optimizing for performance metrics and ensuring that the client is happy with the aesthetic of the final product.

Client usually wants to emulate some elements of the latest aesthetic trend. Can't blame designers for what's ultimately a fashion trend. Especially when breaking from the trends and convention put you at risk of looking dated or driving away consumers.

Edit: some grammar

It's more that, I've read critics of modern web design. And while I can understand that some people don't like it (myself included for some things), the visceral hatred that some people have in their rants against it is so great, I can't possibly send that to a client with a straight face. It's so extreme it's absolutely useless.

Edit: At some point, while you can agree with some of the critics' points, they become completely out-of-touch with reality and the typical user.

The table of content is the bit I like the least. The observation is correct, then entire left hand sidebar of the standard Wikipedia layout isn't actually that useful. Putting the table of content in the sidebar might be an idea, but why the big bulk font? Just take the normal TOC and move it to the sidebar.

One big thing many could learn from, from the standard Wikipedia, and where this "modern" alternative fails, is the use of icons. Wikipedia mainly use text labels, not icons, which mean that I don't have to guess what the three dots mean. When going to Wikipedia, it very clearly states that I am in fact "Not logged in", this modern UI just have the person icon, but am I logged in? Similarly there's a small clock with an arrow, if I don't understand that Wikipedia is versioned, I have no idea what that does. The "view history" is much more clear, even if "View page history" would be even better.

It's pretty fun to play around with alternative designs for pages like Wikipedia, but actual updates should be done because it improved usability, not because it fails to follow trends that will change in a few years anyway.

This reads like a Guardian album review, very colourful - thanks!

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