Light mode, Dark mode, and Gen-Z mode? | Hacker News Reader

Light mode, Dark mode, and Gen-Z mode?

getfilteroff.com

383 pointsbeweinreich332 comments

First things first: I don't think there's anything wrong with the design based on the screenshots. At least, nothing stands out as being so unusable that users would flee for your competitor.

As for "Gen Z preferences", I don't think there's enough to go on here to prove that. I'm over 35 and have watched user interfaces go from the the fun, colourful and UNIQUE designs of the 2009-era iOS apps to the hyper-corporate, boring af grid system that's "Apple Approved". Android is similar, w/ Material Design. I think they have a new one now that replaces MD, but I can't be bothered to look it up.

You're creating a video speed dating app. Dating is supposed to be FUN. Why design it like Zoom? Have you used trivia apps like QuizUp? You'll notice how different the design and dynamics are compared to most apps that are designed to render text/image data in specified fields.

Also look at TikTok/Douyin for an example of unconventional app design. They could have just copied Instagram, which is blandness personified. But they went with an unfamilar style that nonetheless took off. Nobody's asking "how do I turn my camera on" there, are they?

What's old is new again. It's not a generational thing, it's a market maturity thing.

There were plenty of unique UI's in the 80's (every OS with a GUI had a distinct look and feel) and 90's (most OS GUIs had started to look and feel like Windows but a few daring applications took a chance to be different). Kai's Power Tools[1] was my favorite as it had a distinctive look and feel but was entirely functional. There were a number Mac apps with carefully crafted and unique UI's in the pre-iOS days which no doubt took a ton of effort vs. just making a bland Windows-esque UI.

It's not so much that developers stop wanting to push the envelope, it's that beyond being an early stage differentiation gimmick, users don't tend to reward them for very long for the effort. So developers focus on what they do get rewarded for which tend to be the checkbox features vs. their competition and the UI is demoted to whatever the lowest-effort fashion of the day is. Even Apple seems to have settled on slapping on a fresh coat of paint every few years and calling it a day.

[1] https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/kais-power-tools-30

Beyond a few distinguishing elements, the design of the author's app and the design of the purported Gen-Z app aren't really all that far apart.

At the basic level, both are built on a contemporary, minimalist UI discipline, with a similar approach to visually differentiating elements like buttons and fields. The later mostly distinguishes itself typographically, adopting a very trendy "brutalist" type family, with associated practices like mixing widths in the same line. The only other differences are more saturated, high-contrast colors and ambient animation.

The end result for the latter may be considerably less minimalist, but the foundations have a lot more in common than they have differences.

For Android, you’re talking about Material You, which is a bit more colorful and bubbly.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/android-12-the-ars-t...

—

And as to grid systems…well, that isn’t exactly a recent development. Design and typography has been dealing and fighting about grid systems for a long, long time now. This is not a new discussion. At all. We just generally don’t think a lot about the full history of design.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1013

Every time they update Android it puts less information on the screen. Android 20 is going to have the same UI as an Apple Watch.

The problem with ALL of these stupid mobile designs is always twofold:

1) The important information is rarely the obvious thing on the page.

Partiful! Yay, party! Where? When? Cost? Oh, that grey on grey blob. Even filteroff, WTF am I searching for? Why does your "Ready for date night" take up 1/3 of the damn screen instead of something useful to me?

2) Interactable objects aren't obvious.

Presumable that stupid double circle is a trendy hamburger menu. Oh, wait, no, I've get a hamburger down and right. Whats scrolls? What clicks? And how do I go back.

As a side bonus, these types of Social Crapware apps (dating, party, etc.) have a special failure mode:

3) Design for these kinds of apps is ALL about attracting to your app lots of the cruise director type--generally a female who is nominally single and probably right in her mid-20s (age isn't as critical as female and nominally single).

Consequently, design for 25-year-old Anya supersedes ANYTHING else. Period. Bar none. What Anya thinks is good IS good and overrides any other consideration. Follow that trend or get kicked to the curb by the company who does.

You outlined some powerful behavioral and social aspects I have not seen written in any design guidelines or design system anywhere to date. Thanks for expanding my thinking on the dating app Anya design dilemma hah

Really on point here.

Having worked at a company where our VCs demanded we "do what Google does" and then had to adopt the entire "design system" approach, it ends up robbing UIs of anything fun, because all UIs become "design by committee" by default.

This doesn't apply to all types of applications, but one person's fun may prevent another person from completing a task or even having a particular job. Yes, it's possible to design UIs that are both fun (whatever that means) and accessible. But it seems to me that boring, by-the-book UIs are more likely to be accessible by default.

It's funny that you bring up grid systems, because the screenshot of the partiful really evokes how some designers have played with grid systems in decidedly non-minimalist ways: e.g. https://vanle.info/blog/2021/february/josef-muller-brockmann...

> I think they have a new one now that replaces MD, but I can't be bothered to look it up.

Do you mean Material Design 3, or something else?

https://m3.material.io/

> I stare at the page for a second. My brain hurts. I hate it. It felt... distracting, maximal, cluttered, weirdly transparent. Little sparkles animate over the page.

> "How old are you?" I asked.

> "Twenty-five."

> "Of course you are."

You will never, ever, ever do good design while holding your audience in contempt.

They are fully and completely entitled to their aesthetic preferences and those preferences have absolutely no bearing on their worth or right to enjoy the products they use in whatever way they choose to use them.

If you can't have enough compassion for your users to design something they love respecting who they are then you shouldn't be designing for them.

This person wrote an entire blogpost on how to understand and compassionately design for Gen-Z aesthetics and your response is to slam them for... not understanding and compassionately designing for Gen-Z aesthetics?

Come on.

The post I read was a person defensively justifying their choice to not design for Gen-Z aesthetics.

The author did design for Gen-Z aesthetics. At the end of the post, he says they may even complete the feature.

They did design it but in the whole post he was making fun of it. This Gen-Z mode that he designed is not made out of compassion for the users but rather as a parody of Gen-Z aesthetic.

I had fun reading it but I feel it is a bad business move to attack your user base, and I assume that they have more users around the 18yo of the spectrum than 75.

Would he also make fun of a boomer mode, with large buttons everywhere and "get me out of the app and just call person" feature?

I’d argue you should always design for yourself and build products you want.

When your needs aren’t in alignment with your user’s needs then you’re the wrong person for the job anyway.

User feedback is important for getting additional insights, but the implementation of the feedback should always feel correct to you too.

Designing for yourself is definitely the easiest way to have good affinity for your users. But it also limits the set of products you can create.

People that aren't software developers and designers deserve to have good software designed for them too.

All you really need is genuine compassion for others to do good design for them.

That's a little bit like saying a barber should only cut hair the way he'd want to wear it. Being part of a professional, maybe the defining feature is to be able to understand what customers want and to do it without bringing personal preference into it, unless that's asked for.

I don't think professional designers have the option of only designing for themselves.

It's a bit like only programming for one's own problems. Sure, some people can do that, but most need to solve other people's problems to pay their bills.

I like your sentiment, but I think this only works at the start. After the initial MVC phase, you discover additional potential target audiences, and often (but not always) it makes more sense to apply empathy and adapt the software to also benefit their needs, rather than just abandoning then as "not the intended audience".

MVC phase? That's where my projects end, not start... Betting that was MVP! (Actually they start there, too, to be honest)

My projects seem to end at MVP.

(Which might have been the joke you were attempting to tell, while we're being pedantic.)

D'oh, yes, I meant to write "MVP", and editing is already locked

As much as I would like to agree in principle, I am slowly starting to see author's POV. Modern web is a clusterfuck and modern UI, to me, is not even meeting the needs of the current generation ( what with the A/B testing and dark pattern galore ). It is prettier, but that is only thing it has going for it.

Whenever I need to help someone on their phone/PC or answer a question it's a UI problem in 80% of cases. On phones button icons are an inconsistent mess with no visible way to find out what they mean. The menu bar on Android is at the top, the hardest to reach place on the whole display. Fast list scrolling and other details on phones/tablets are ignoring left-handed people. Phones have 6 inch screens but maximum font sizes are still too small for some users.

Interacting with Android's notification list while it's being updated is simply impossible if an app shows and hides progress updates multiple times per second when fetching new content, making the whole list jump up and down.

All those problems affect not just one generation and were solved at least a decade ago. And it feels like all I can do is press a few buttons for them or say "turn it off and on again", and yell at clouds inbetween.

One is rather small sample size for what users want.

As a product manager, I read this and found a founder clinically dismissive of user perspectives and feedback that doesn't align with their own internal viewpoints. Confirmation bias to the n-th degree. His quote of her feedback ("It's so exciting. Every time I open it, it makes me happy. Sometimes they have doge pop up!") is almost certainly embellished and is a non-empathetic take on a genuine user perspective.

The mock [1] even radiates the "millennial snowflakes" energy that used to be prevalent, with the "You are unique. You are different".

Thinking about it further, I actually think this is a super clickbait way to get hits and link clout? If you look at their blog [2], it's really just advertising all of the different dating verticals this company runs. And gosh, the names are horrifically cringey. "Sappho Dating", "Matzoball Dating", "Subtle Curry Dating"?

1: https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/6197f007be798d88368f80d7/623... 2: https://www.getfilteroff.com/blog

"Subtle Curry Dating" is a reference to the Facebook group "subtle curry traits", which itself may be an offshoot of the "subtle asian traits" group (I forget which came first).

These are both examples of Facebook groups aimed at a large but unconnected group of people from similar backgrounds. I think they can be fundamentally considered to be "subreddits, but on Facebook". Imagine /r/BlackPeopleTwitter but for (South/)Asians.

As someone with the right context in the target demo, I find "Subtle Curry Dating" to be a hilarious name. Not only that, I think I'd be more likely to find someone I mesh with on that service than the same service with a different name.

Edit: some cursory googling revealed that "Matzoball Dating" might be a similar sort of in-joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matzo_Ball

If you do something for an audience it is fine to alienate everyone else. It might even be required to avoid "one size fits all" Or moving away from the topic to attract a larger audience.

Exactly--"Kosher masala pussy" needs to be right exactly once.

Never thought I’d see those 3 words used together before… wow

> And gosh, the names are horrifically cringey. "Sappho Dating", "Matzoball Dating", "Subtle Curry Dating"?

"Sappho"/"sapphic" are fairly common self-descriptors among teens/twentysomethings on a few subcultural niches like Tumblr. Ironically your own comment is an example of the tendency you decry; you're clearly not familiar with the markets at play here.

Sappho is literally name of famous greek poet from island of Lesbos, which may help you guess that they are probably lesbians

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

Haha, I appreciate this reply. Sure, I'll be up front and admit that I didn't actually get use of matzoball dating and subtle curry dating/etc, but as an LGBTQ+ individual, I think I understand how the Sappho descriptor is trying to be used here (hey! It's a LGBTQ+ dating app!), and yet I still think it's a misapplied pattern match? And that's what led me to think that the keyword uses are also less-than-very-good references.

That is to say I personally wouldn't use a dating site themed around a reference for LGBTQ+ erasure. Though perhaps this doesn't represent everyone's opinion, and that's okay!

(For those out of the know here on Sappho/etc, see the subreddits /r/AchillesAndHisPal and r/SapphoAndHerFriend)

Knowing little about the community and how they use the terms, I would interpret these subreddits to be about raising awareness that this is just as natural a way of life as any other. There definitely is the reference to it's historical erasure and modern occurances, but the focus imo is on raising awareness. In which case, using it where others that see it , who are unaware of it's existance, is probably "free promotion".

[Edit] my english is bad... added some changes to grammar.

I thought the exact opposite. The narrator thinks the gen-z site is ugly, busy, whatever, and then realised that's what a segment of the market wants. You left out the "and then" part of the story.

To me, it's more like he begrudgingly admits that her views are probably representative of "Gen Z", and then makes a mock(ery) of what he thought he heard her say -- which ends up as a cheap caricature of her legitimate feedback. FWIW, I agree with her comments: it does feel sterile, in the sense that it looks like an app I'd schedule a doctor's appointment through, and it has a dorky, "safe" appearance, that evokes nothing of the spontaneity or playfulness that people associate with good dates. More broadly though, I think the author's kidding himself if he believes he can make a dating app that appeals to 75 year olds and 18 year olds alike, especially by prioritizing the design preferences of the former over the latter.

At age 50 now, I'd prefer a Gen X mode where the font size is 125% and the text is high contrast.

Just in general its nice to have an interface that highlights the right features and makes it clear what is a button, what is text and the sort of interactions I will have before I click on it. All the research on UIs done in the 70s and 80s seems to have been abandoned in the pursuit of a new look that is less easy to understand.

The amount of time wasted in Windows constantly changing the interface skin (especially the new taskbar that has lost a lot functionality in Windows 11) instead of fixing core issues in the OS or expanding elsewhere is a concerning cost of human time. I suspect many people buy "pretty" rather than functional but its kind of annoying the amount as an industry we waste on trends that achieve nothing other than a make over.

Yeah, I wonder if these trends the author is picking up on (i.e. "Millennial Boring on Purpose" and "Millennial Minimalism" vs the Gen-Z "Excitement" and sparkles) is more of an actual age thing vs. a generational thing?

I'm still in my 30s, and I prefer the Millennial Minimalism now, but I didn't always. And I find myself bumping up the font size to 125% once in a while - and I expect to be doing it more and more as the years progress.

Same, and I agree fully. I saw the websites that came out when flash/shockwave was new and they were DECKED OUT and that sh*t went sour way too fast. I went from crazy designs to "millennial minimalist" as soon as I turned 30+.

Yea, from what I remember of the leading edge Gen Y/ trailing Gen X culture in early 00s it was similarly fucken crazy and eclectic.

Cat photos with cut out style animation playing guitars. The whole electroclash thing. Just watch the music video for The Knife’s heartbeats.

I associate the sterile corpo chic with 2015 onwards because in my young adult days (2011-2014) we were wearing Aztec print stuff, ripped 501 jeans and iridescent shell jackets with fresh prince colour vomit snap backs, bright plastic sunglasses and abusing psychedelic amphetamines like it was 1988

Eh, as a Zillenial, I like it when my eyes don't hurt so I'd probably use that mode too

I thought it was "Zennial", but then again for the longest time I also thought the "millennials" were "Gen-Y" and that Billy Joel actually started the fire, so wtf do I even know anymore about what generations are called

Just to add to the confusion there's also "Xennial" which is pronounced exactly the same way but refers to people ~15 years older.

Huh: I always pronounced this one "ex-ennial".

Yeah. Part of the same simple/spare design fashion is small grey fonts.

Boomer mode is when there's 13 advertising popups all over your screen and autoplaying videos on full volume.

Hear that honey? Free cruise! God I hate my wife.

That Joe Brandon has bio labs in the Ukraine too! Election stealing sonuva…

That has nothing to do with this webpage's article.

Though, if you must know: The US has clearly said there are bio labs in Ukraine, and that they've built some and funded others.

  The United States, through BTRP, has invested
  approximately $200 million in Ukraine since
  2005, supporting 46 Ukrainian laboratories,
  health facilities, and diagnostic sites. [1]

And from the US Embassy in Ukraine:

  BTRP has upgraded many laboratories for the
  Ministry of Health and the State Food Safety
  and Consumer Protection Service of Ukraine,
  reaching Biosafety Level 2. In 2019, BTRP
  constructed two laboratories for the latter,
  one in Kyiv and one in Odesa. [2]

The 2005 agreement between the US DOD and Ministry of Health of Ukraine, signed in Kiev, is here. [3]

[1] https://media.defense.gov/2022/Mar/11/2002954612/-1/-1/0/FAC...

[2] https://ua.usembassy.gov/embassy/kyiv/sections-offices/defen...

[3] https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/05-829-Ukra...

Someone of age 50 in 2022 is part of Gen X not Boomer gen.

I'm aware of that.

I think jamil was implying Boomers are too stupid to know how to install an ad-blocker. As a Gen-X, I’m inclined to agree.

Wow you're old as fuck and calling the slightly older group stupid.

The "Gen-Z" look feels wrong. But if you step back a little bit, all the "flat design" trends of 2011 also felt wrong in the exact same way. "You mean that after all the advances in computer graphics we're going to just go back to text on top of a rectangle like Windows 3.1?" A lot of people forget this since flat design is just how everything is done nowadays.

It's not the same as in Windows 3.1 at all. We now have shadows, gradients, far better colors and a lot of smooth animations [0]. The basics are the same, but if you compare the designs side by side, you'll find more differences than similarities.

I feel that there was a transition period were you really needed to show of the new capabilities and colors that your computers can do now. But with current trends, this won't impress anyone anymore and just look cheap, so people got back to subtle, timeless designs.

[0] I'm assuming a well-done design - you can of course overdo it.

Shadows are an essential design element of Windows 3.1, they are just used differently. In flat design a button is a flat piece of paper that may cast a shadow below it because it floats above the layer below it. In Windows 3.1 [1] a button is instead a 3d object that casts a shadow on itself, but because it's "glued" to the UI it doesn't cast a shadow below it.

I agree that they are very different though. Windows 2.11 is a flat design [2], Windows 3 - XP are a design philosophy of physical metaphors.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x#/media/File:Windo...

2: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows_2.x#/media/D...

I think that subtle and timeless have veered into rigid and stultifying. Of course master designers are able to twist it and make it fresh but there aren't enough of them on earth for every project to have one.

For me internet video speed dating is a concept that's fun, spontaneous, maybe corny. None of that is expressed in the filteroff design which looks more like an accountant's blog. It's a "filter on" look.

It looks like a defensive design intended to avoid criticism, but does that inspire users to go out on a limb and try a new form of dating?

Perhaps a different minimalist design (or changes to the copy text) could do the job, but this seems like exactly the type of app where a maximalist, colorful, tongue in cheek kind of design could have worked.

windows 3.1 used contour depth perception. That is one of our fastest perceptual algorithms, truly a gift from nature. 2022 throws that in the trashcan.

> You mean that after all the advances in computer graphics we're going to just go back to text on top of a rectangle like Windows 3.1?

When a friend of mine saw Windows 8 screenshots his first reaction was "why does it look like Athena[0] widgets?" :-P

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Athena_Widgets

Windows 3.11 had semi-3D buttons.

"we're going to just go back to text on top of a rectangle like Windows 3.1?" A lot of people forget this since flat design is just how everything is done nowadays."

That's contradictory. "Flat" design is just text on a rectangle (at best); Windows 3.1 actually indicated what was a control and what its state was.

I'm late 40s and would prefer the Gen-Z mode in a dating app. Give me clean and utilitarian on a note taking app or something where I'm creating. Give me something fun (but usable) for something that should be fun.

Yeah, let's not paint the entire web with one brush. Very astute point.

Yes, it's more playful and maximalist. I'm honestly happy these days when I see something that doesn't look the internet equivalent of midcentury modern / Scandinavian interior design.

But isn't the fun a matter of gameplay mechanics, rather than UI colours?

Gerald took off his glasses and rubbed them a little on the tablecloth. He was bewildered. How could this be, he kept thinking to himself. No--how, literally, could this be?

He couldn't have known it, but at that very moment, the same conversation, and the same bewilderment, was being had, in offices over lunch hours, around dinner tables in startup work condos, all across America. Something had shifted.

In later years this age would come to be known as: The Dawn of the GenZ School of Itinerant Design. GenY art historians with goth hair and overcoats tried and failed to analyze it as a "return to the retro-aesthetics of MySpace and Geo-cities, heralded by Glitch", but the labels never stuck. Older, wiser and more bitter professionals, fustily defogging their glasses while seated defeatedly at their architect-style slanted drafting desks (with optional standing desk accessory), would oftentimes mutter to themselves, alone at night in their downtown 23rd-floor apartments, lit only by the synthetic warm-LED glow of their ironically chosen "Banker's lamps", a different name for this cultural watershed: "The End-times' Madness." But nobody listened to them anyways, and they didn't much care.

> Older, wiser and more bitter professionals, fustily defogging their glasses while seated defeatedly at their architect-style slanted drafting desks (with optional standing desk accessory), would oftentimes mutter to themselves, alone at night in their downtown 23rd-floor apartments, lit only by the synthetic warm-LED glow of their ironically chosen "Banker's lamps", a different name for this cultural watershed: "The End-times' Madness." But nobody listened to them anyways, and they didn't much care.

Well, I feel seen, except that it's a Tolomeo desk lamp and I keep a flat desk (with standing desk accessory) as I sometimes use solder in anger.

The formatting in italics makes this seem like a quote, but I can't find a source. Is this a quote from a larger work?

Well, I imagine it to be a larger work. But it just came to me now as a sentence / fragment of a larger one. I haven't written it yet...should I do this?

This was fun to read because of the pomposity, but I'm afraid it might get rather dull when extended in the same vein.

/ dons flame-retardant suit

// braces for downvotes

..much like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

"Those that fail to read William Gibson are doomed to repeatedly reinvent his style."

Heheh :) It's not pompous when it's justified :) I guess it was so brilliant you were scared everyone would see how dull you are :) heh :)

You have a good way with words so I'd absolutely read it.

Yep!

At one point the entire web was fun and quirky, then myspace came along and everyone stopped making their own webpages opting instead to customize their profile in crazy ways, then facebook came along and only allowed rigid government like structure. Tumblr was a beacon of hope for a time, but then wild creativity moved to sanctioned playgrounds like minecraft, or to the personal web pages of highly skilled artists.

> then myspace came along and everyone stopped making their own webpages opting instead to customize their profile

... that's a weird re-writing of history. The vast majority of people on MySpace never made their own webpages, and MySpace wasn't the first "customize my profile hosted on someone's site", as LiveJournal, Xanga, and others came before it.

not the first but definitely the largest, probably by two orders of magnitude

I don't think myspace ever had an order of magnitude more users than LiveJournal. Do you have any data to the contrary?

> facebook came along and only allowed rigid government like structure.

And suddenly, I could comfortably read content again. For me, it was an amazing time, no more eye-hurting colors and fonts, but finally just nicely formatted text. Content was nice, ordered, and chronological. For me, MySpace and similar sites back then were like someone linking foone (sp?) twitter threads. I want the content, but I hate the presentation.

> At one point the entire web was fun and quirky

I'm guessing this time was when you were ages 15-25 or thereabouts?

I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary.

I'm guessing this time was when you were ages 15-25 or thereabouts?

I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary.

Dammit, you got me. I was thinking of that age range exactly, and I'm always a sucker for a simpsons quote.

Though it is undeniable that "web masters" in the mid to late 90s were more willing to try wacky things, even on corporate or political types of sites. There weren't frameworks to keep things reigned in, and it was rarely a full time job, so the fact that it worked at all was enough for most people.

I remember most of me and my friends breathing a collective sigh of relief at how clean Facebook was when it came out, compared to the chaos that was MySpace

Not everyone knows how to, or even wants to create their own website. These platforms also make it easy to share and network across members. It was really only a matter of time.

Geocities comes to mind

Design trends come and go. Minimalism is has probably already peaked, and typically when a trend peaks the next trend intentionally runs against it.

The "gen-z" look reminds me of the early web when people thought that <blink> and <marquee> were really exciting html elements. Those were noisy pages, but they had the feeling of an enthusiastic hobbyist scrapbook, and that was part of the appeal. "I could make something cool like that." That "artsy teenager's notebook" aesthetic is like the 90s web reborn in high def, this time with 40mb of javascript along for the ride.

Agree. I feel like I've heard so many comments recently that the web looks so boring, and people miss the old fun of the early web. And people who miss the web of the 90s and early Oughts are by definition not Gen Z...

I'm excited for a bit of bang and pop and messiness and individuality to come back.

With it, I hope for return of websites. You can't display individuality on an endless scrolling feed of social media.

I haven't heard nearly as many people wanting a return to maximalist 90s web design. People miss the time when a website wasn't a 3 megabyte download, and didn't pop up a newsletter signup form. They don't (as often) miss the web pages with 100 animated gifs on them, an over the top tiled background, blinking text, and so on.

Many more people want the minimalism of a page that gets out of the way and shows you the content you came for, which was (if you like) 90s web design minimalism. That's the motivation all this gopher revival/gemini protocol stuff is about, at least from a design perspective.

I'm just trying to say there were different strains of "90s web design" which are not compatible with each other.

Yeah, I recently made a portfolio site for a friend. Very minimalist: https://christinelopez.ca

It's hand written. This was also an early web thing: no npm build pipeline. I feel a little bad not making the modal view fallback to image-is-a-link when JS is disabled (I also would've opted for no google fonts, but it ultimately isn't my site)

Meanwhile another friend built a similar site: https://kaeillustrates.art which may have more of that Gen-Z aesthetic (albeit we're millennials, so it doesn't go overboard) & is built on tailwind/react

Hopefully minimalist-as-fashion design will go away & minimalist sites can return to being small memory/dependency footprint

That's just rationality intertwined with nostalgia.

I mean, I do acknowledge how messy 90s websites were. Overly bloated with GIFs and annoying MIDIs playing on the background. But they were full of personality. And it was also a time where getting into "the internet" was an exciting thing by itself.

Only us, people who are "computer literate", complain about a 3mb download or 10mb javascript blob. Most people don't care as long as their phone or computer are able to do the job.

> People miss the time when a website wasn't a 3 megabyte download, and didn't pop up a newsletter signup form. They don't (as often) miss the web pages with 100 animated gifs on them, an over the top tiled background, blinking text, and so on.

This is really colored by who you're paying attention to.

https://yesterweb.org/webring/members.html <-- this is a lot of Gen Z, especially with the more active people. Literally animated gifts, tiled bgs, etc.

> Many more people want the minimalism of a page that gets out of the way and shows you the content you came for

This is an assumption, not data.

I started out a little curmudgeonly about the style, but was won over by Persona 5: https://www.atlus.com/persona5/home.html

It's messy, chaotic, and feels like something from the late 90's/early 00's, where you'd often see custom web pages using formatted images as elements of the page. But I love it. I can't quite make sense of it, as I adhere pretty strongly to brutalism/minimalism when designing my own content.

Persona 5 did really well with balancing their line work and colors. The colors are very bold and in your face, but so is some of the strategically placed line work, so you can still visually differentiate everything.

It looks like a well-designed comic book.

https://heckscaper.com/plugins/ and https://heckscaper.com/aminals/deuteronomy/ (warning: semi-NSFW) is a powerful aesthetic of loud colorful idiosyncratic individuality, which makes any of the websites or software I've tried building pale in comparison.

yeah and get myspace back as well.

> Minimalism is has probably already peaked

I hope so, I thought that the original intent of it was anchored in a functional way of designing UIs. Now it seems to have been taken to absurd levels where important controls are hidden behind modals, dropdown, hover states, popovers etc. instead of just being visible and available when you want to use them. I really don't understand this but have given up pushing back on it.

I think hiding controls is driven by the limitations of phone screens, and mobile-first thinking leads to substandard desktop or tablet experiences.

> mobile-first thinking leads to substandard desktop or tablet experiences.

This IMO is what made Win8 so bad.

Every good idea gets unmoored from its original purpose and driven to absurdity. Look at agile, lean startup, etc.

> The "gen-z" look reminds me of the early web when people thought that <blink> and <marquee> were really exciting html elements.

Literally the thing that went through my mind when reading the article: "the 90s/early 00s design is coming back!"

Time to start replacing the cursor with unicorns barfing rainbows (or nyan-cats, whatever you prefer!) and adding on-click confetti explosions to our web pages again.

What an exciting time to be alive!

My first thought when I saw the example designs was Geocities; my second was Myspace.

Beyond design trends and generational preferences, the purpose of the app in question matters. A video speed dating app should probably have a more fun atmosphere than Hacker News, Wikipedia, or the Wifi settings panel.

It also has the appearance of people using nothing but MS Paint as an image editor. Slap dash quickity fast. No need to wait for 10 minutes for PS to launch, this task will be completed before that.

I for one, as a mid-life gen-x-er, can't wait to welcome our new gen-z design overlords if it means that we bring some visual variety back to computing.

Bauhaus and Midcentury Modern have incredible staying power. There hasn't been this kind of movement yet in web design. I think it is because we still don't know how we use it yet.

We got Modernism because Beaux Arts and Art Deco were too much fun, and then the Germans were like, Nein! No more fun! Only grids!

Haha! But which would you rather clean: a living room done in Beaux Arts style, or one done in modernist style? Assuming you cannot afford a housekeeping staff, that is. :)

It comes and goes. It doesn't really stay.

Spot on. This is just the anti-trend to minimalism, which again was the anti-trend to what I grew up with:

https://www.cameronsworld.net/

(which was the anti-trend to the original, booooooring beginnings of hypertext)

'All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.' — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I think y’all are conflating two completely different things.

There are “fun” sites where proper UX, information hierarchy, and general good design patterns take a backseat to some wild design (band websites for example).

Then there are sites that focus on productivity which should have all the elements of good design. Craigslist is from the 90s, yet it doesn’t have sparkles and random shit scattered across the page.

Everyone is reminiscing about the wild designs of the past. How many of those sites you visited were actual productivity focused sites vs now? You can’t compare Geocities to Jira…

I'd add that design trends and taste are also regional.

Minimalism isn't appreciated in some Asian countries. Their print, ads and web pages use every single inch/pixel to saturate it with the maximum amount of content, be they text or visuals. It even translates to physical products, as an example a laundry machine with 500 buttons and lots of blinking lights.

> typically when a trend peaks the next trend intentionally runs against it.

Humans naturally crave both novelty and familiarity and the tensions between those desires mean that aesthetics will always evolve and oscillate.

I really appreciate the design of Cruelty Squad (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/), it's deliberately garish and ugly but it's also very endearing.

> Design trends come and go.

True. Buy my training is in military, process control, and nuclear. In those context, I've never heard a project manager say "make it look like a game". Whereas in business apps, I have heard that many times.

And that is a good thing, some applications, explicitly not apps, have to be made to work and function properly. Not to look good or fancy.

Just wait until someone proposes to build a blinky-clicky UI on top of the serious stuff to make it easier for users. No joke, I have that problem at work right now...

when the ui doesn't evolve with the user base, everyone in hawaii gets texted a nuclear emergency alert

You’re talking about “weirdcore”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XpgddVUidq0

The comedian/meme personality Sam Hyde was doing this a couple years ago https://youtu.be/7ENMpzR54us

A lot of the comments are saying this looks like a 1990's website. I think it's kinda true, but there's also something extremely modern about it. Much more raw than the partiful design. I really like these graphics and would be very interested to see a website rendition of this aesthetic

I blame Ritalin for this type of video, either someone took too much or needs to up their dosage.

Visual graphix aside, it's just exhausting to listen to. Dude, take a breath, or at least allow your viewers to take one. Had to double check I didn't leave my YT player in faster than normal playback speed.

IMHO, at least the abruptness of the cuts (trimming off all silence between clips) is intentional, part-and-parcel of the aesthetic being demonstrated. Weirdcore is abrupt.

I don't know about the rest — might just be the video's author's style — but I have a feeling the high speaking speed is there because they're mostly reading a definition off of this article (https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Weirdcore), with no content editing to compress for time, but still a need to make the video feel like it's not "dragging on" for viewers who are impatiently waiting for visual examples. (The proper thing to do here would have been to do the content-editing of the script, of course.)

There is a whole genre of YouTube videos where people talk like farm auctioneers. I give you PrestonPlayz:

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

For those who don't get the farm auctioneer reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkPUX8rv7gs

It takes literal ages to edit videos in this style so while the end result may resemble h.264 encoded ADHD, the process does not.

It's seems pretty obvious that they made the video in this style intentionally as an example of weirdcore.

Ritalin?

I blame some late Gen-Xer who got stuck in a basement and got too obcessed with gaining likes on the internet they just morphed into this one-weird-trick pony with their clipart coming exclusively from 90's Magazines that come with a CD kinda thing

> I blame Ritalin for this type of video, either someone took too much or needs to up their dosage.

Maybe I’m overly sensitive, but I’m really tired of ADHD ableist jokes like this one. With the controversy and struggles of medication for ADHD, implying that the only functional ADHD brain is a medicated one just frankly sucks.

That is the result of Max Headroom getting an account on Myspace while corresponding with Geocities for design tips.

I am a little surprised to see no one question the author's description or assumption of "Gen Z".

As someone presumably from Gen Z, I find both interfaces either bad or terrible. The partiful design is outright tacky and looks terrible (nothing homogeneous, questionable design choices etc) but Filteroff has so much whitespace it feels like it was designed by soulless corps at Uber or Facebook who just studied from Pinterest.

And as a GenZ who's immersed in tech (news), the fact that this is the first time I'm hearing of Gen Z design definitely raised my eyebrows.

Welcome to what millennials have experienced for a couple decades: Older generations who think they know exactly what the younger generations want based on little more than a stereotype or maybe the feedback from one young person they spoke to once.

Millennials are spoiled by the attention. The Committee for Generational Distinctions is still trying to erase the existence of GenXers.

But it all gets better in your 40s. That's when you and your peers start to have enough power and money to be catered to. And when the 20-somethings start bitching about you.

> Older generations who think they know exactly what the younger generations

This is frequently called 'society'. Keep breathing long enough, you'll find yourself on the other side of that behavior.

We millennials are turning forty, for the first time, this year!

I'm waiting with eager anticipation to hear what wrongs our whole generation is uniquely responsible for.

We're responsible for all the ills caused by things the Gen-Xers were apathetic about.

> But it all gets better in your 40s. That's when you and your peers start to have enough power and money to be catered to.

laughs, then starts weeping in perpetual renter

Honestly, I've seen more camaraderie between millennial & genZ than adversity. Both of us got the luck to be born to "interesting times".

I think what pulls Millennials and Gen-Z together so much compared to other generations is the Internet. We're connected in ways no previous generation has before.

> The Committee for Generational Distinctions is still trying to erase the existence of GenXers.

As a member of the Gen X community I am completely fine with this. Oh well, whatever, never mind us.

No way, man. We're gonna keep rocking forever!

But he didn’t ask just one person, he checked with multiple. Obviously that is still too small a sample size, but who says he isn’t on to something?

That's not new. Gen-Xers got the same thing. Boomers got the same thing. Lazy stereotyping wasn't invented yesterday.

I don't think this blog post means to stereotype all of gen-Z though. I think they're just using it as a foil to talk about the counter-trend to early-21st-century minimalism. That was in turn a counter-trend to late-1990s / early-2000s eclecticism like old Geocities.

> late-1990s / early-2000s eclecticism like old Geocities.

My first thought seeing the Gen-Z version was "why don't they show a flashing marquee banner, an email with flapping wings, and play some MIDI music while they're at it?"

>Gen-Xers got the same thing

GenX got ignored. The baton was passed from Boomers to Millennials. I guess we were all taking a bathroom break or something.

GenX UI, at least on the Web, was TABLE layouts with spacer GIFs dictated to us by Boomers who wanted brochures. Our crowning design achievement still lives on in WiFi router Web management tools and phpBB.

Yo, anybody going to the Phish concert? I need a ride.

In my opinion phpBB remains a more usable interface than many modern software applications, especially the web. Dense with information, tools that empower the user to sort, search, and filter. Ability to express yourself via avatars and signatures, multiple color schemes and interface options.

Tears for Fears is touring again and I'm planning to catch Steve Hackett as well.

Still being talked into seeing a-ha and Duran Duran. Go Gen-X!

> GenX got ignored. The baton was passed from Boomers to Millennials. I guess we were all taking a bathroom break or something.

There weren't enough of us. Also we were apathetic to everything. At least that's what I was told I wasn't really paying attention.

Eh. I agree with what you are saying, but also think the general trends they are pointing out do seem to sort of be preferred by Gen Z.. more "maximalist." Look at Depop, for example.

--fellow gen Z-er

I can't speak to the Gen Z angle but...

Design is somewhat of a fashion business and we've seen a period where simplicity and spareness has been the fashion. Apple's aesthetic by way of Jony Ive post-skeuomorphism is probably the most familiar example. But whether influenced by or part of the same fashion trend it's extremely widespread. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to find something of a backlash.

i agree with the rest of the comments in the thread. there are certainly generational stereotypes, i guess in the world of design ours are an overdose of gradients and rounded corners lol. personally, i'm a fan of a little bit of the maximalist vibe and some brutalist elements mixed in. everyone should try to cultivate their own "aura", that's why i make a shit ton of personal websites (at least one every year) and experiment with trends that i like.

i'll go ahead and also point out where i see these trends are popping up all the time: web3 and crypto. notably, zora and the rainbow wallet do them well, i feel. i think you'll find that the design teams for these companies are pretty young. i even know of some high-schoolers that are part time employees for web3 companies (as designers).

i guess it's a little tangential but it's something i rarely see talked about with web3 -> they will succeed not because of the legitimacy of the technology but largely because of their appeals to the young*. young people love anything with hints of counter-culture and feeling like we're a part of a revolution; it's a thing, i think. though, decentralized stuff isn't really all that punk anymore...

--(another) fellow gen Z-er

* s/o Kropotkin

The samples on HN might be a bit skewed, its design is after all a bit on the boring side.

> its design is after all a bit on the boring side.

Web 1.0 utilitarian design

You could even say it has fans.

A bit boring? It's as dry as a bone :-))

> the fact that this is the first time I'm hearing of Gen Z design definitely raised my eyebrows.

Isn't the author's description of GenZ essentially "Snap's UI"?

Reminds me of the Girls quote, "I think that I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation."

I'm pretty sure it's just intentional flamebait to promote their product.

sounds like u need to go to more parties friend

I remember the time when I first used <marquee> and I jumped like a little kid. Fast forward a few years when I started designing for web as a career, and I was sad to see that nobody used <marquee> in production. It turned out to be a toy.

Heart broken.

But I grew to love the minimalism design.

Recently I started Youtubing and make designing thumbnails, minimal doesn't work. The demography 18 to 35 year old prefer something that quickly grabs their attention.

Amused to see the trend seeping into UI/UX as well.

> [..] <marquee> in production. It turned out to be a toy.

Screens were tiny low res, mice had no wheels and people where not used to scrolling. I don't think <marquee> was originally intended as a toy, even though it was mostly used like one.

Type <marqee> in google to see an easter egg.

Millennial here, I welcome anything to break up the current design aesthetics. I never liked material design and designs from Apple and Google both look tired.

I did dark modes before it was cool, but now that I'm getting older, I want some kind of grey mode. Something that doesn't feel like I'm looking down the barrel of a flashlight nor something that's gonna cause eyestrain.

As for all the flashy doodads and movement. That's more designing for psychology than aesthetics. Movement looks exciting, and has been used successfully for years in other mediums.

I was wondering how long it would take before I saw someone advocating for webpage backgrounds to be grey again. Mosaic (and later Netscape) had the right idea from the start. It's only too bad it's taken so long for us to get back to where we started.

Sincerely,

an old curmudgeon.

P.S.: Get off my lawn!

I want web page backgrounds to respect the defaults I set in the browser. Remember those settings? They are still in your browser but the first thing a web designer does nowadays is force background and font colors, text sizes, and so on, totally disregarding the user’s set preferences.

Now get off MY lawn!

You can force a font and minimum font size at least in Firefox or set a default zoom level. One trick for anyone trying this is that English can be under Latin or Other and Firefox only allows this setting per writing system not overall (possibly some or all others can also be under two options similarly). Setting minimum font size does break some things (text in SVG diagrams being unreadable is the most common one I see) but I don't see how anyone can manage with the tiny fonts websites use. Zoom is less likely to break things I think but I don't like that it scales images.

I just checked and in Firefox you can also force text, background, and link colors. I imagine that breaks some things also.

Lots of websites load css from their CDN that is usually a CNAME, so a consolation prize of using uBlock Origin in advanced mode with CNAME decloaking and blocking third party sites by default is that text is often more readable (once you get to it, there is usually a bunch of extra random junk and only sometimes a "skip to content" link).

If light mode is too bright, it means your screen is too bright. It should be easy to fix.

Why does dark mode cause eye strain?

I suspect GP may have astigmatism. A girlfriend of mine had it and constantly would complain about my devices being in dark mode whenever she had to use them. She eventually showed me an article on how it does actually make text harder to focus on for them.

https://medium.com/@h_locke/why-dark-mode-causes-more-access...

Yep I have that too.

That is a really good article by the way, thanks for sharing.

Your eyes dilate more to see dark mode than light mode. This causes a softer image requiring you to work harder to see it clearly.

Ideally you want there to be a balance between the brightness of the room and the brightness of the display.

I first noticed this "Gen-Z" mode trend when I played Mario Kart on Wii. Compared to N64 or SNES, the screen was so busy. I honestly had a hard time keeping track of where my player was and where the "track" was compared to all the colorful fast-moving background cruft.

I'm not a gamer so maybe I'm just not used to it. Fortnite seems like another example of how "Gen-Z" and headachy a digital environment can be.

For sure people will downvote me for not being a gamer who gets it, or for being an old fuddy-duddy. Wanted to provide the perspective though.

Are you sure the N64 and SNES Mario Karts weren't just less busy due to hardware constraints? N64 had limited polygon count compared with modern gaming systems.

Also, the Wii came out in what, 2006? It's definitely a millennial gaming system.

>It's definitely a millennial gaming system.

In fact I can't think of another product that's more quintessentially millennial than the Wii.

> In fact I can't think of another product that's more quintessentially millennial than the Wii.

Antidepressants come to mind

Competitive gamers agree with you and have been trying to increase visual clarity for a long time. I remember finding out about picmip back in quake3 and never looking back [0]. In AoE2 there was a mod called 'pussywood' that made the trees smaller so you could see things. People then also started putting borders around tiles and cutting buildings so they didn't block what was behind them [1]. In SC2 some weird settings made invisible units more visible, I think you set everything ultra-low apart from shadows or something. There are hundreds of other examples, if you watch any competitive gamer stream, their game will look different to the default experience you'd get if you installed the game yourself (unless it's a tournament stream, they'll turn all the settings up to max for that 'gen-z' factor).

The problem nowadays is that companies are incentivized to reduce visual clarity by selling super flashy rainbow skins(doesn't apply to Mario Kart, applies to Fortnite).

[0] https://twitter.com/cabbagebrains/status/1246155602625064961

[1] https://imgur.com/hqRkLh2

Visual clarity vastly depends on the game and what sort of playstyle it's going for. For competitive shooters, it matters a lot more to be able to visually detect enemies slightly visible behind corners, eg. Valorant with red outlines on characters. However, regarding Fortnite, having a flashy animated rainbow skin actively makes it easier for other players to spot you, so if they were really incentivized to sell flashy skins they'd make it so you could choose a skin that other players see and a separate skin you see.

Mario Kart on Wii was released in 2008, when the oldest of Gen-Z would have been 11 years old. I'm pretty sure that's too young to be setting design trends.

It is the perfect age to be stamping pliant young brains into the shape they'll retain for the remainder of their lives. They associate informational assault with happy and busy and expect the association to be a part of the world.

I have the same feeling sometimes. With some games it's really easy to understand the world and figure out what's going on. With others I feel like I'm spinning due to how blurry everything is or that I'm starting into the sun due to the intense brightness.

As for user interfaces, video games are excellent case studies. My favorite example is the Ace Combat series. It shows how a functional interface themed after aircraft screens can be easier to manage than futuristic interfaces. At the same time, the futuristic interfaces manage to show a lot of geographical information in 3D instead of 2D maps.

It's always impressed me how much story telling is done through these interfaces. Before every mission, there is a briefing video where an officer explains context to the player and other pilots in the squadron. It's stylized as an officer literally booting up military software, authenticating with it and using it to present data.

https://youtu.be/dHsBpf9As-0

https://youtu.be/ctun9SEza4Y

I can't seem to find a single video of the menus themselves, apparently everyone cuts out the parts where they're navigating the menus.

Fortnite is pretty visually clean if you ask me

I don't think the Wii is a gen z thing.

I don't think it's cheugy at all because none of this aesthetic is try hard.

Think it's just more the SV aesthetic that was spawned from iOS7 and Material design era forwards was originally meant to be the glass of water in the land of skeuomorphism has instead become the aesthetic of all products the optimize for conversion rather than experience.

All your kind of miserable experiences in the notification misery mobile world have the background muzak of iOS7 and Material design. It's almost like carpet and celling tiles of the DMV.

And west coast/SV just doesn't understand anything beyond this aesthetic anymore, there is no charm or whimsy in any of their products, even when they try to forcefully inject charm into it like with Memoji the end result comes across like a robot make it, it's just not actually cute or funny just feels gross somehow like there isn't any cuteness, humor or wit to any of it and it's super apparent when you compare it to similar products like Line Friends or even Bitmoji manages to have wit to their work.

You've pushed a whole generation of designers in SV to focus on the wrong thing really and this is why all these SV platforms will eventually be up for grabs and the ones that dethrone them are going to be coming from strange places and wont be understandable to the current platform barons. Look how alien Tiktok was to IG they're still trying to replicate it but its almost like they can't understand it and I don't mean because it's a Chinese product I just mean the muscles required to understand what make it great have completely atrophied in SV product designers.

> I'm a 33 year old straight male

Completely off topic, but why do I need to know your sexuality? Seriously, can we stop doing this? It does not matter.

> I'm a 33 year old straight male and you could sum up my design sense as pretty "basic." Err— sorry, "cheugy."

It's a joke. Straight men are stereotypically less sensitive to fashion trends than women or gay men. He's using his age, gender, and orientation to make light of how baffling he finds the design preferences (and language) of other groups.

From a marketing perspective (which informs UIUX), these demographic qualities do matter.

If it doesn't matter, why does it bother you?

OP wants you to know he’s unusual.

I hit partiful.com and found this after scrolling a bit:

The Recyclable Camera Includes development, a prepaid mailer, & free shipping.

Photos are sent straight to your phone, where you can upload them to your Partiful party page.

Go ahead, make some memories

(The specs: Premium Kodak 400 ISO 35mm film with 27 exposures.)

Really? Everything old is young again!

lol, that's almost literally kodak business model from 1920's :-D

It really is the roaring 20s all over again!

I'm way into my middle age, and I find the author an obnoxious and boring stuck-up who thinks that our collective recovery from the 90s' excess is now a sacred cow. Meanwhile, the discussed design is just a rather restrained and so-so exemplar of post-Tumblr aesthetics—which by themselves are the first good visual trend in ages. If the author thinks that this is bad, I wish upon him a prolonged experience with approximately-15-year-olds, with some Japanese TV on the side. And if the author is like this at 33, I probably don't want to read his writings ten years from now.

Perhaps the author should also learn that just like there's a ‘fashion statement’, so there's a ‘design statement’—though I'm not sure of a proper term for that.

P.S. The imagined ‘Filteroff for Gen-Z’ screenshot is barely less sterile than the baseline, and it's almost textbook corporate bells-and-whistles to ‘reach the young audience’. Perhaps the author would want to run the imagined design by Anya again.

Somewhere along the line we forgot there was end user interface customization other than light and dark mode. It was called themes.

Every single element of design featured on this page looks terrible: the apps and websites visible in screenshots, the blog itself. The excessively rounded ages make me feel as if I was in a children's house, where everything was rounded so that children don't hurt themselves hitting their heads on corners, or even on a children's carousel. The text on the website isn't evenly centred inside the boxes (top padding is smaller than bottom padding). Generally the spacing between elements, and between elements and text makes the site cause nausea. Also, compare how much space there is between the word "Date" and the enclosing box (claustrophobic) with how much space there is between the "+" sign and the enclosing box (agoraphobic).

Overall, modern design is awful.[1]

Regards,

A Gen Z-er bitter that Win11 is going to bring round edges back[1]

[1]: Yes, it looks like I've run out of positivity for the day.

[2]: Rough edges of Win10 were the best thing about its design, that was otherwise questionable in other places.

We think alike. I am building a UI framework that goes against the grain of basically all contemporary design. It will echo the Berkeley Graphics philosophy:

  Emergent over prescribed aesthetics.
  Expose state and inner workings.
  Dense, not sparse.
  Explicit is better than implicit.
  Regiment functionalism.
  Performance is design.
  Verbosity over opaqueness.
  Ignore design trends. Timeless and unfashionable.
  Flat, not hierarchical.
  Diametrically opposite of minimalism. As complex as it needs to be.
  Driven by specifications and datasheets.
  Beauty emerges automatically without deliberation.
  Do not infantilize users.

Humans can handle complexity. Especially, building UIs for technical people. McMasterCarr is being used by millions, yet it looks so unlike today's contemporary bloat: https://www.mcmaster.com/

If you're interested, sign up here: https://berkeleygraphics.com/newsletters/

I think those are all good ideas. Minimalist design trends have nothing to do with generational taste, and everything to do with practicality. As technology became more ubiquitous we had to design for less technically-literate people, period. Simplicity, if nothing else, generally makes it harder for people to get in trouble with the UI. It definitely went too far, but the inspiration was for the most part usability, not aesthetics.

“The excessively rounded ages make me feel as if I was in a children's house, where everything was rounded so that children don't hurt themselves hitting their heads on corners, or even on a children's carousel.”

This is exactly why I can’t use MacOS anymore. It’s a neon-pastel-candy-colored, everything-is-rounded, excessive white space UI nightmare for me.

I feel similarly about macOS. The Snow Leopard/Mojave-era rounded-edges were at least passable. But what they did in Big Sur (re edges, padding and colours) is straight up comedic. Unfortunately, it appears to be the platform with the best selection of desktop apps.

Have fun missing out on M1. Mac OS Monterey looks fine to me especially on dark mode. What ui element you use often is neon pastel colored exactly besides the window controls and the loading cursor? (Which we’re almost always colorful)

Oh no! I'm going to miss out on a processor which is faster than some other processor under certain workloads! Please say it ain't so! Oh god what ever will I do with this x86-based Mac? I guess I'll throw it out for fear of missing out on... something...

I recently downgraded all my Windows machines to Win10, because they UI and ads were obnoxious. I'd prefer Win7, or better, Win2K, but driver support only goes so far back.

The spacing is messed up here and some of the sizing is questionable but there’s only 2 instances of rounded corners I see so I think your exaggerating a bit.

That being said it doesn’t invoke the feeling of a safe dating app to me.

Very little character and "authenticity" in websites that default to very safe choices and heavy use of whitespace for a low density of information.

I'm not a designer, but that's the first thing that comes to mind when I see the "correct designs." You have zero branding. What website am I even on?

The author is close to an epiphany, but I feel doesn't quite reach it.

Yes, the last few years has seen iOS design trends to learn towards sterile apps where there is little uniqueness across apps.

This is good for novice users, the consistency makes it easier to onboard into a new app. The downside however is that many apps feel the same and have little differentiation.

The solution is to invest in UX and design to find ways to give your app a personality while keeping with the visual affordances users have learned. The solution is most certainly not to add sparkles and off angle text boxes.

> visual affordances

What visual affordances? Those were all removed in "the great flattening".

I miss skeuomorphic.

Gen-Z mode would get me more excited, interested to use the app for its intended purpose. Shouldn't all apps aspire the same?

I agree, I am not much younger than OP, but I think the GenZ version he posted is much more engaging. His default one is definitely lacking soul. But I dont think you have to give up Minimalism to gain that soul.

The point is that you get more excited by that, but I personally would never use that app lol

You must hate Hacker News then.

Hackernews is (fairly) well designed for it's purpose, so I don't understand this comment. The example in the article is a party app.

You are aware that form can help with function, right?

HN's clean interface means you focus on the articles, and one would hope (though not in your case it seems) take it atleast a little seriously/professionally in how you interact.

A speed dating app like filteroff? It's more casual, you should be at ease, it shouldn't remind you of MS teams.

I'd really like the author to ask the same question to their friend again in 8 years. That'd be a nice experiment.

Haha, touché. I will set a reminder to do that.

1. You made a boring design. It's not a gen-z thing to dislike sterile, clinical designs that look more suited to businesses.

2. This is an ad, and seems like it was intentionally written as flamebait.

There seem to be quite a few negative comments assuming contempt/stereotyping/whatever in what seems to me a tongue in cheek and equally self(cohort) mocking article. It seems fair enough to hypothesise generational taste differences, there's hardly anything new about that.

I like Filter Off, it's a breath of fresh air in the dating app space though the last time I looked at it it was mobile only which kind of dissuades those of us on the cheap end of the camera spectrum...

I don't know if it's related, but there seems to be a trend these past years of ugly design taking over...

The first company I remember was Dropbox but they seem to have backpedalled on that when looking at their current homepage.

Gumroad or Xolo recently updated their websites and are perfect examples of what I'm talking about:

https://gumroad.com/

https://www.xolo.io/

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

Dropbox also used to have beautiful design - now it's similar to those 2 links you posted...

Very 90s meet current web. Doesn’t surprise me given a lot of snicker designs these days.

If we have to call it "Gen-Z" mode to get back some personality in software and interface design I'm all for it. I grew up with theme options on websites and software and desperately want it back. Windows Classic, Winamp, message boards with multiple theme options.

I'm so tired of every interface being just floating text on a white background with excessive whitespace. A border differentiating parts of an interface seems to terrify modern designers.

Whoa buddy, hang on, sometimes there's a little toggle that changes it to floating text on a black background. Only power users allowed, of course.

I don't know about the millennial angle, but minimalism does seem to be on the way out. As a university teacher, I spend a lot of time staring at the lids of laptops (as much as I'd like to ban them).

Back in the late 2000s, those laptops would be covered with various stickers -- Obama, sports, home star runner, etc. The last decade or so they have just been shiny unadorned metal or plastic.

This year amongst my 18 year-old students, the stickers have started coming back.

Honestly I am fifty years old and the "Gen Z" theme is much more appealing. The light one at the top of this post is incredibly boring and grey. Grey background, grey buttons, greyed-out photographs. The right screenshot is slightly better with the touch of blue but it's not very saturated. Little thumbnails. A tiny but of color from the image next to "Ready for date night?" but not much.

Hire an artist, get some kind of fun mascot drawn, make some font choices that aren't the same ten fonts that ship with iOS, get them to do some comps of really out-there ideas to make it a fun place to come look for someone to date. Right now it's just the Grey Zone. Come here to look for a grey person to have boring grey dates with. Woohoo.

Change the look now and then. For holidays. Big ones, little ones, local ones, made-up ones. A real-world meeting place would do this, why shouldn't you? Talk to the same artist about doing that.

Hell, even pick a day in the middle of winter to be Grey Dates Day and have a monochrome skin for laughs. Whatever. Get some color and whimsey in there.

(The post ends with "we're hiring a creative director" so I guess they're kinda looking for an artist now.)

Counterpoint: The Babysitters Club [0]

> Apps like Seamless and Yelp listen in on our adult lives, then speak to us like children

> In the face of the overwhelming question — “What’s it for?” — a strain of avant-garde art responds by playing up its inutility, she argues. It magnifies its impotence until “it begins to look silly.”

> We cannot find food on our own, or choose a restaurant, or settle a tiny debt. Where that dependency feels unseemly in the context of independent adult life, it feels appropriate if the user’s position remains childlike, and the childlikeness makes sense when you consider that Yelp depends on us to write reviews, and therefore must, like a fun mom, make chores feel fun too.

> There is no better example of cuteness applied in the service of power-concealment than Pokémon Go, which is a large data-collection and surveillance network devised by the former Google Earth engineers at Niantic and then candy-coated with Nintendo IP.

0. https://reallifemag.com/the-babysitters-club/

I remember reading an article comparing Google maps with Waze and it criticized the UI of Google maps to be “traditional” and considered the Waze UI to be superior. I guess it was written by gen-z.

At the time I was shocked - since when did the google UI become the traditional? They really had no clue how long it took us to get things look right.

Is it just me, or does anyone else find this whole lumping people into arbitrary generations with silly labels completely stupid?

I don't see myself as broadly similar to other people who happen to be roughly the same age as me. Then again, I'm GenX, so I guess I'm just cynical ;)

I've never actually heard the word "cheugy" used except by howdy-fellow-young-people journalists who think they found out how kids talk these days. I think it may be a trollword specifically intended to bait such journalists, similar to Megan Jasper's fake "grunge slang" the New York Times got suckered into publishing in the early 90s.

That app design looks like GeoCities barfed into a Unicorn Frappuccino. I don't see anyone (except maybe little kids) enduring it for long as a practical UI. As a bit of fun, like GeoCities pages were, sure, why not, but cloying UI becomes psychically fatiguing over time -- a lesson that could/should have been learned from the UI mistakes of previous generations, but alas.

The prime example of this is Snapchat. I don't know why it has so many buttons and why there are so many secret menus (behind the swipe left and right) or why the buttons are placed there.

Compared that to Instagram where the buttons are obvious.

At first glance, "maximal" is not the conclusion I would have come to. The author using this term implies the opposite of minimal. While yes, there is more graphic "noise" I suppose, the UI itself still looks minimal to me. I can tell very easily what this page does and how to submit a new party. Minimalist design preferences were always about this. Don't make the user think in order to accomplish their mission. And this doesn't make me think. It's the antithesis of "put a thousand options in one window and then expect the user to watch a vhs training video before using it".

I wish there was a platform where I could express the UI purely in terms of content, structure, and behavior, and let the design be supplied by the platform, with the ability for the user to override it. Then someone else could deal with fickle fashions while we application developers focus on what matters. I don't even want to have to provide a default design, e.g. a Bootstrap stylesheet. But of course, if I use pure browser defaults, it looks like something from the early 90s. Maybe the HTML5 doctype should have told the browsers to go with fashionable defaults in addition to turning off quirks mode.

I remember the first time I realized I was no longer interested in “interesting” UI when I tried out Snapchat. Later I read a Gen Z user saying that the obtuseness of the interface was a plus. I wonder how much is a factor if biology and how much is a factor of having a million responsibilities like maintaining a home, working at a non-entry level in your job, etc., and just not having any interest in needlessly expending mental bandwidth on interacting with an app for yet another few precious moments of my increasingly limited time.

> but many do not like "millennial minimalism."

Reminds me a post calling prior, post GAR generation trends as the 'gigabore': https://web.archive.org/web/20170731050026/https://medium.co...

An increasing problem I see with designers is that they no longer use tools that are truly capable of pushing pixels. Sure, Figma et. al. can crank out nice looking flat designs, but that's about it.

We are essentially experiencing 'vendor lock in' in the digital design space, where the tools being used are no longer easily capable of exploring different styles of design beyond the current trend.

Can you give an example of something you can't draw on Figma? I'm having trouble picturing what you mean.

Sure - I would say many of these would be much better suited for creation in a competent raster-based tool:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/9c/a8/7f/9ca87fcc3a2bed54edfb...

https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/02dcb79b40989932a37ce8...

https://cdn.dribbble.com/users/1866209/screenshots/8200836/m...

https://cdn.techinasia.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/iBooks...

It's not surprising that pixel art is easier to make in a raster editor than in a vector editor.

The 3rd image was probably made in Figma or Sketch though. It would probably take more time to build that in Photoshop than Figma, and the result would be harder to make changes to.

I hope that in a few more years we've gone full circle and let users install their own quirky UI themes again just like in the late 90's.

Me too! That’d really whip the llama’s ass.

This hits the nail on the head and I never even realized it. I am a religious minimalist when it comes to design, I have no idea why but progress from the 90's sites just seemed to keep removing things so it felt like a natural progression.

I can see why the change from minimal to 'busy' would be the inverse when starting from a minimalist POV like the younger generations. Great article.

What amuses me reading the comments here is thinking that among characteristics of how people behave, the "gen-<foo>" one may have one of the highest standard deviations among them. The bell curve of what a GenX likes is nearly flat, vs a GenY which is equally flat, but it's non-flatness just a little bit to the left (or right). Repeat for all Gen's.

Stop caring about what the kids think! "The kids" have always been (even my generation), and will always be, STUPID

I see how you can reach a generational correlation, but I believe it's a age issue that isn't unique to any generation.

The younger people want the pop and sparkles. The older people want what they're using to simply work because they value their time. The pop and sparkles are a distraction that doesn't add to the functionality.

Age is implied here. The author isn’t comparing the Silent Generation to the Baby Boomers. They are comparing two successive generations, which by definition, have an age gap.

With product design becoming more data-driven, feedback-loop A/B testing etc, won’t the natural evolution of the field be toward UI/UX that’s tailored to each user client-side given their known profile of design and interaction preferences, learned by AI?

In other words, in the long run will this even be a problem anymore?

Can we also have a "Gen-X" mode, when I can use dark theme for UI and light theme for content?

This boggles my mind that I can't have it in any OS or browser. The fact that I want muted-looking UX doesn't mean that I want the same for content. I can't read white-on-black text for longer than a minute.

It actually looks a lot more engaging. I didn't even realize it's a dating app from the screenshot.

You know, the internet I remember looked a lot more like that "fun" app, once upon a time... Bright colours, flashing marquees, comic sans everywhere.

I don't think GenZ is the problem here. The bland corporate aesthetic that has taken over tech spaces is... bland and corporate.

The example of 'Gen-Z mode' is a product that acts as a party invitation. Wouldn't it be more fair to compare it to something like evite.com, which has similar attention-grabbing animations, but probably cater to previous generations?

I don't think it's a generation thing. Culture maybe, but not generation.

Also, it's possible to have a colorful and energetic design while still being usable and intuitive. An app doesn't have to be minimalist to be functional.

I think this might actually have nothing to do with Millennial or GenZ or whatever.

I mean, the author has just a single data point.

The author's friend might just happened to have liked that particular design, and it might not be true for other Gen Z people.

"How do I turn on my camera?" is an all too common email we receive."

This may be more a case of boomer mode, but I opt for everybody in software development to be put on customer/user email support for a while. It's very educational, humbling, and maddening.

You could have a giant flashing camera button permanently in the UI and you'd still get this question. People still can't find it or they can and then double-click it, shutting it down again. The amount of ways in which people can misunderstand even the simplest of interactions is a sight to behold.

This still pales compared to what for some websites/apps is 75% of their support requests: logging in. You think you've drawn out every process, sub process and exception, but people will find many new ways to screw this up.

One of the core UX lessons is that people don't read anything, so any instruction is in vain. They operate on vague patterns from other experiences, muscle memory and basically just click based on intuition, and if that wasn't what they wanted, they go back and try something else.

Random offtopic feedback, please add speed friending mode; I'm not interested in dating but would love to meet new people and chat via video. I really like the app idea and the landing page too, nicely done!

I know the article doesn't really talk much about dark mode in the end, but the title in context does sort of imply that Dark mode is Millennial mode. I whole-heartedly agree. I never got the hype.

Don't pigeonhole users to a specific theme based on age. Sure, use age to set an intelligent default theme, and provide a way for individual users to overide that and choose the theme they want.

Party Round is another recent Gen-Z design: https://partyround.com

Although their particular design aesthetic is also very common in the NFT space.

Looking at that partyful website vs. the author's app, an immediate analogy struck me as Discord vs. Microsoft Teams. (doge

So what is it? Colors? Animations? Gamification? Memes? "Crossing the line"?

The Partiful screenshot in the article reminds me of mid-2000s TV-focused media player UIs (Windows Media Center, XBMC/Kodi etc). Must be really awkard to use in a web/mobile context.

it's actually amazing on mobile

Neocities, Gen-Z sites that look like the early web: https://neocities.org/browse

I am definitely not Gen-Z but neither look especially exciting to me. Both are sorta boring in their own way. Nothing like the insane stuff we used to see on Geocities!

Designer is shocked to find out that the corpo-minimalist-copy-paste design isn't universally beloved. So it must be about age or gender or race or something ...

The Partiful tagline on Twitter is “Facebook events for hot people,” which shows that they’re fully aware they’re they anti-facebook. It’s the entire schtick.

Never heard of partiful, enjoyed looking at the design of their website. What really stuck out to me is that for the most part the design isn’t actually that noisy (some colors and informality fits well given the product), but as you scroll down there’s always one element on the screen that’s “abnormal”: a marquee ish thing, some word art looking title, etc.

I think, as a millennial, when I was growing up these elements were often design smells: only a boomer will use word art unironically, etc. our clean minimalism became the suffocating corporate vibe of the 2010s (via tech giant software).

Now, word art in the right context can be playful and imaginative without the boomer vibe. Hip startups are disrupting the suffocating millennial minimalism. Brilliant.

I find this weird but i've always sort of resented generations (Boomer, GenX, etc) that aren't mine (Millenial) but Gen Z is the first one i've really liked. I find the general Gen Z humour to be very funny. I love their mercurial embrace of trends and tearing down of sacred cows. The way they approach work/life balance, call out stupid cultural norms. Their attitude and acceptance of people not like themselves.

By the way I know this resentment is stupid and unfounded in any reality - its just a feeling I have.

I know this is all generalisation and not everyone born between two arbitrary years are like this - but the general vibe I get from their generation is that the kids are going to be alright.

I'm firmly a Millennial but I relate a lot more to Gen Z because our childhoods/formative experiences had a lot more in common. (For example, I got online when I was 4 and was allowed free rein, very similar to a lot of Gen Z/"iPad kids", but that's a pretty rare experience in my age group [33]). Our worldviews are more aligned as well: Things that people thought were insane when I said them 10-20 years ago are now mainstream. I feel like I have backup for the first time in my life.

I adore Gen Z.

This is what the news and Reddit want you to think about our generation. The reality is much different from my observation

What are the actual differences between millenials and gen z? I would argue both are characterized by the fact that there is no single fit-all characteristic. There is no common pop-culture to define a generation any more.

Experiences. One big one is that most Millennials were hit by 2008, while Gen Z wasn't, but at the time we believed what we were told that 2008 was an aberration and things would get back to normal. We were also raised in the "go to college and you'll be set for life" era, so we were given expectations that were then ripped away by rapid change.

Gen Z didn't believe anything they were told to begin with, because while Millennials grew up in the 90s and early 00s and got some optimism in our culture, America has been a polarized, rapidly-changing nation for pretty much all of Gen Z's time.

The tl;dr I'd say is: "Millennials had our expectations dashed, and Gen Z didn't build up the expectations to begin with."

(Note that I'm not commenting on whether this rapid change is good/bad/malicious/whatever. Just that how we've planned for and lived our lives has changed a lot in the last 15 years.)

Older Gen Z graduated into the pandemic, like millenials with '08

Well I have to say, the Gen-Z design at the end is full of life and I love it, it embodies fun which is exactly what I want to have on a date.

I think its better to test with a bigger sample set.

Over the years I always thought that general UI and web design trends tend to follow whatever the latest version of MS Windows does.

I mean, this is not new?

Has the OP ever been to MySpace? Before Facebook came in and swooped all, MySpace pages all looked like that.

Is blingee GenZ?

I've never seen partiful.com before. I love it! This design is fun and custom. It's perfect for a party planner app.

Surprised this "content" didn't upset more of the "my internet shouldn't have ads on it" people.

The mistake the author makes is to define the visual design around a generation. Which is like defining an visual design around gender. Both can be salient but it’s rare for either to be the dominant characteristic that centers a design.

Task is generally the correct choice. Consider two apps: One is playful, coy, energetic, private and safe. The other is efficient, prudent, clear and secure.

It’s likely you can confidently determine which is a dating app and which a banking app. If I told you one is a dating app for boomers and the other a dating app for millennials you’ll have a much harder time.

Millennial here. I like whichever one loads the fastest.

Disclaimer: According to my wife I am not to be trusted with decor choices.

At least the title is showing developers that themes aren't a `isDark` binary that I keep seeing in the wild.

The proposal reminds me of a modern version of all the bad flashy <marquee> and related flags from the 90s.

I'm a Millenial but I really prefer the GenZ mode, out of these 3. Boring UX is BORING.

Its just 80s and 90s UI again... they are not unique but theyy think they are kill

Your design is fine. It’s your research methodology that’s holding you back.

To be fair the original design didn't look bad, but it lacked color!

What does a Gen-Z kitchen look like if that was a millennial kitchen?

I do not care much about "basic" and "minimalism" vs more baroque approaches. Each has its place. Kawaii, Glassmorphism, Uniyo-e, you name it, they can all work in the right context.

What I desperately need though, is Boomer-Mode. It can be Boomer Light or Boomer Dark but when it is active both are 100% consistent. When I'm in Dark Mode I want everything to be light on dark, no exceptions.

Nothing drives my aesthetic sensibilities - as well as my aging eyes - more crazy than sudden contrast changes.

Gen-z? Looks like a 90s zine.

It’s like the themes in iDVD

MySpace. Not dull at all.

lol the partiful.com background image file is 4mb.

it does look pretty sterile and boring

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