The Danger of Minimalist Design

The problem ain't the minimalism. The problem is the lack of color/contrast. Paint that bollard yellow. Paint that phone booth red. Paint that railing purple. Paint that bookcase pink. Paint that skyscraper with so many colors it make's Joseph's Dreamcoat look dreary and dull. You end up with something that's minimalist and interesting.

It’s interesting — I dislike about 50% of the photos, but love the other 50%

9 comments yesterday, if anyone is curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31804073

It’s not minimalism problem, just bad design and /or larger cultural and urbanism trends, examples can be found in any time period

It's an interesting thread to see. The question of "do we have anything more to say" does seem to have been supplanted by an economic voice at scale...

If you are doing anything at a large scale, there are immediate and huge disincentives to focusing on concerns of detail. A bench, a doorbell? Attention to those kinds of things is even seen by some as a sign of unhealthy obsession, when working together at broader scale.

Plus, if you want to be at least a little bit values-oriented, you kind of have to admit that being authentic to a core vision probably does not mean designing a deeply values-oriented doorbell to go on a Sketchup-style, economic-incentives-focused house. At the very least you are applying some values-focused duct tape, metaphorically.

And it gets more interesting to add in the lens of economic systems. Economic systems add a disincentive for attention to intrinsic value. Economic systems will attempt to leverage the concept of value, and communicate based on value, but in fact the scale factor (above) creates a tidal effect that will lift or sink everything during powerful economic cycles, intrinsic value or no. This fact really gets a lot of investors upset. Somehow mixed in with their Buffet-style opinions on the intrinsic value of a nice can of Coke, there are some straight-up funny positions that are less about value and more about being able to buy stuff, and feeling secure in being able to buy stuff for the rest of one's life.

The last economic cycle was up, up, up. Every system was impacted by broader tidal movements. You think you need deep, beautiful icons? No you don't, go with flat and functional. Depth will capture you while you fight the tide. The tide that wants to put money in your pocket. Why fight it? Move fast and move on.

That cycle created incentives to deploy capital at scale. In one stroke of a pen, virtual or real, you'd readily create a house, a neighborhood, a city, a business employing thousands, an airport, a re-do of part of your city. Or you'd deploy a fund, a coin, etc.

So there were and are really maximalist incentives toward minimalist design: Detailed, values- or character-centered design has no leverage (it is barely seen at such scales), and no right to reveal a soul (such a thing is unnecessary and demonstrably economically wasteful in many ways).

Still, we will likely see the return of "(buy, build, sell, the thing) you can count on" narratives as we refocus on stable, intrinsic value, emerging from the current economic debacle.

Old-timey indulgences in detail will probably reemerge as a reminder that we have values, somewhere.

And tutorials on skeuomorphic logo design may really get popular again...