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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

And there’s still a design language underpinning the site. It’s chaotic and loud and whatever, but the elements are consistent.

It’s not random. Still has a theme and a palette. I like it as well.

It looks like a well-designed comic book.

yeah and get myspace back as well.

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

I actually really that that site design!

One note: can you tag that NSFW or somesuch? Even artistic nudity can be unwelcome and get people in trouble.

Surprisingly, his site seemed to load faster for me.

That's the thing. Computers have become so fast & bandwidth so wide that the bottleneck is primarily latency

Interesting point!

> 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.

are you really saying that website you linked is a gen z design? looks like something out of 2004, looks horrible... or maybe it's not loading well on my phone. but that's not....

The website I linked is a list of members of a webring, because such a survey presents more examples than a single page can. The creators of the pages in the webring are predominantly gen z. The argument it is supporting is about which people want which strains of 90s web design to come back. If you look at a few pages in the webring you will see which strains these young people, at least, want. That's what I'm saying. Whether you consider it horrible is immaterial.

So that site is interesting to me because it comes across as retro more than anything else.

It's almost like a charicature of 90s web design rather than actual 90's web design.

To be clear, I'm not saying they have bad taste. What I'm saying is that there's always design subcommunities who want retro this or edgy that, and they're kinda ridiculed or marveled at or admired for their distinction, or whatever, and then the majority of users look for something else for daily life.

It's a kind of design sampling bias or something. The huge swaths of genz who don't care or who like the minimalist stuff, or who say that webring is too much are off on TikTok or some other platform not bothering.

It's certainly self-aware pastiche, not the 90s original, for sure. But I guess what I'm saying is that the idea that "the majority of users" want XYZ or are even looking for design styles actively isn't actually something substantiated by data in any of these claims, and there's enough interesting counterpoints that none of us should be confident our preferences are shared by the masses. Design sampling bias and mindless imitation certainly brought us a lot of the cookie cutter whitespace affairs we see also.

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 care about things being slow, but our industry has done a fantastic job of covering up the fact that it constantly makes everything slower by convincing people they just need newer devices. It is sickening.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

> 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. :)

My own living room is done in 'jumble of whatever' style, so there's that.

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

If the UI takes precedence over funtionality you don't pass financial audits.

sounds like a reason to stick with intuit and microsoft

Or not to think about using Palantir to build a UI over an ERP-system because certain people refuse to work directly in the ERP.

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

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.)

If only it were this video

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.

Literal ages is such a random gen-z way of describing this!

I'm literally a video editor/motion graphics person, so no, this doesn't take "literal ages" to edit.

They also had to pick a one-second slice of a "thematically-related" music track to set each of the ~100ish readings to. That would take a fair amount of time during editing, no?

Those are called sound f/x. They are quite common and are litterally just 1 second sounds to be dropped into a timeline. There are libraries upon libraries of them available. They used to come on vinyl and had to be recorded in to something useable. Then they came on CDs and could just be ripped. Now, they float around as YT videos or other websites royalty free.

This would be common knowledge amongst people that have spent any time in an edit bay as a client or as an editor. It's one of those things that those that know just sit back and smile while those that don't are in awe.

It's depend how you are skilled and how good your editor software is. With bad software it can take ages.

While I may not be a 10x dev, I'm at least an 8.5x editor. Experience goes a long way as well. Knowing when/where to use certain technique, how/why something takes longer, etc all add up to make an edit session go faster.

The linked video is a pretty slow entry to the genre. Look at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmTsa3rFU0

There's approximately three animated memes per second in these and people are usually using pirated Vegas to make them.

> 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.

This. Thank you.

>Maybe I’m overly sensitive

Yes, I would suggest in this specific instance you are.

>but I’m really tired of ADHD ableist jokes like this one

Not once did I mention ADHD which is a medically recognized condition. However, the use of Ritalin in today's society is not limited to those that are prescribed Ritalin as a treatment for ADHD. There are many many people that use it recreationaly. Being around people using it as an upper gives me the impression that I'm stuck in molasses with their hyper-everything. It's exhausting.

> Not once did I mention ADHD which is a medically recognized condition.

"Needs to up their dosage" would imply someone who medically requires Ritalin to treat something, which could only be ADHD. Take that part out and the joke is otherwise fine/about what you're saying.

Perhaps. I will stipulate that for those with no knowledge of recreational drug use, this could be an interpretation.

However, anyone familiar with recreational drug use knows there's a common phrase of "know your dosage" right along "know your dealer". Yes, it's borrowed from else where, but it's still a thing. Do I need to eat half a bar, or take 2? I might suggest Wolf Of Wall Street as an example of knowing one's dosage.

That phrase is about knowing the maximum dosage beyond which the side-effects render the trip unpleasant; along with the threshold dosage below which you don't get any effects.

Taking "too little" Ritalin recreationally — i.e. not meeting the threshold dose — doesn't result in ADHD-like symptoms.

Unless, y'know, you have ADHD. In which case it's not "recreational usage", you're just self-medicating.

Dear lordy, you must be having an agenda here. Other people are injecting ADHD into this conversation.

People taking Ritalin when not prescribed to them by a doctor do not care about ADHD-like symptoms. They are using it purely as an upper. "To help them concentrate" or whatever they tell themselves. It's less "trashy" than meth, easier to find than coke. The affects are also different than these other drugs.

Little defensive there, huh.

Sure, feel free to go around the internet and accuse people of something, then make fun of them for being defensive when they explain how it's not what you thought. Especially after preceding your entire post with "I might be overly sensitive"

I don't even know how to respond to you. Saying "Little defensive there, huh" constitutes "mak[ing] fun of"? I'm not sure who's actually the sensitive one here.

Besides, pointing out ableism isn't an accusation. In fact, I don't accuse you of anything personally, I bemoan the joke. In the face of this, you retreat to a scenario where you are besieged every day by recreational Ritalin users in order defend your ego from maybe admitting your joke wasn't actually funny (or accurate).

there are people who have to sleep outside, you know

Did you reply to the wrong comment by chance?

no, i implied you're grandstanding about something insignificant because your compassion for humanity is superficial and conditioned on your ability to be noticed showing it off. if it was genuine you wouldn't have busted their balls for saying something that wasn't even mean, just crass in the way most of us are in real life.

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'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

Gen-Xers were slurping down Jolt Cola blasting MTV (when there was music) as they hacked the Gibson while building the internet! HACK THE PLANET!!!

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

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

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