The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism
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Adding more shading and depth cues to user interfaces is a broader trend that has continued since the popular repudiation of those tools in the early-mid 2010s, but the attempt to package this up and shoehorn it into a neat label alongside "skeuomorphic" and "flat design" was never a particularly useful exercise. I wrote back in 2013 about how these prescriptive labels obscure the tools they represent: https://interuserface.net/2013/05/flat-is-not-the-opposite-o...
Every time you open the app, you can enjoy that little piece of art. The artist rendering of the digital model of the object in question.
Now all OS GUIs feels completely the same.
As if there is a War on Aesthetics and art treated as an infection to get removed.
At the same time, I was making apps during the skeuomorphic period, and it was a lot of fun! We used to pour a lot of effort into the UI, creating simulated lighting effects, and I'm glad I got to be a part of that period of app design.
With modern GPUs pushing bitmaps is actually far more efficient than drawing shapes.
> it adds more visual noise to parse for the user
On the contrary. It gives better visual cues on where to find what you need. Also noise is actually good in some cases. I have a blue noise background for my terminals which tremendously helps with eyestrain.
No I mean it's inefficient from a product development standpoint. With a flat design, you can make a design system which will scale very easily to multiple screen sizes and aspect ratios. If you have to texture everything there is much more you have to account for.
> I have a blue noise background for my terminals which tremendously helps with eyestrain.
Yeah I mean blue noise is one thing, it's explicitly non-information, but I think in general trying to parse text on top of a pattern is harder than without.
It's the opposite.
Art is a concrete rendering of a symbol with the opposite of noise: meaning.
The compulsion to send a more artistic asset to the category of noise is the replication of the anti-aesthetics culture in GUIs current designs.
As if it would not be alternatives, like appreciation of it in lighter forms, which, Neuomorphism feels like a reasonable attempt at that.
Like they used to put a lot of extra ornamentation on buildings during the baroque period, but eventually people mostly stopped doing it because the building functions just the same without it, and it's harder to add it.
All games are apps. All games are expressions of art.
The price of removing all possibility of art in software, leads to an expression of some kind of software brutalism and UIs that only a niche of temperaments would be fine to work with (and feel from suckish to a torture for the rest).
Have you noticed that we could be talkning about almost the same but factor out the subject of the discussion and make it music?
First of all, not all games are art. A lot of mobile games are effectively slot machines optimized to get you to keep pumping in quarters for a chance to feel rewarded.
And music is quite different from most apps. The entire purpose of music is to convey a feeling, emotion, or energy level. The aesthetics are deeply intertwined with the intrinsic value music brings to the world.
An app might only exist to give me directions to the nearest grocery store. The aesthetics are adjacent to function there.
That may have been a joke, but there is a certain playfulness that I think the industry is still trying to find again in the modernist period that came as a reaction to past excesses.
Edit: Found the mockup: https://imgur.com/twSdV
I disagree. Skeumorphic UIs always were much easier to parse for me than flat design. Maybe I was just subjected to terrible implementations of it, but everything in flat design started to melt into itself after a while of staring at it. I had a hard time distinguishing between purely visual things and interactive widgets.
I‘m speaking in past tense because things have improved. Current flat (inspired) design is easier for me than X years ago.
Meanwhile with skeumorphism, I immediately groked what was what because things had correlations with items in real life. But I think the biggest helper was skeumorphic having naturally more visual depth, which helps me tremendously.
But maybe that‘s just me. I also have a hard time watching Kurzgesagt videos (although they‘re also getting a bit easier for me). Their flat style is so hard on my eyes. Maybe I‘m just broken.
I use my phone exclusively as a tool (a tool for communication, for social media, for learning, etc). It's aesthetically and functionally designed very well and that's all the art I need from it.
I only want art when I want art.
It's a terrible design system, it looks like you took a perfectly good interface, draped a table cloth over it, and pushed it upwards so you have this weird silhouette feature going on.
Personally, I found the designs repulsive. That sounds like a hot take, but I actually found myself averting from the unnatural shadow diffusions and artificial heights in neumorphic concepts, the way some are repulsed by depictions of holes in solid surfaces or slightly distorted faces. I wouldn’t want to have had to interact with many of those elements daily.
It's like trying to typeset a book in a font face intended for catchy slogans on a leaflet.
And funny to see Neumorphism trend fading. Wonder if that actually will happen as I'm perfectly accepting of it.
Neumorphism feels like the low-calories version of Skeuomorphism (which I feel is a big win over flat).
Not only is it (obviously) less distinct than a border or an edge where color changes, it breaks outside the visual box model of the page due to spreading outside the element's grid placement, which makes everything look less distinctly part of a grid. box-shadow, when relied on to distinguish edges, is anathema to the human visual system in an unconsciously subtle way. It's fit for light touches that add onto an already clear and accessible design but never for relying on to achieve clarity or accessibility.
We realized this during the flat design era but then proceeded to overshoot things pretty far until exterminating shadows became a hot trend. Now there's a backlash, of which 'neumorphism' is the apex, which swings things too far back in the other direction. Just keep shadows light and use them sparingly, it's not too hard.
Creativity in this domain is undervalued.
It's a design language that doesn't get one into a PR trouble, I get why it exists.
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Too bad. I personally think it's a huge improvement over flat design.
Neumorphism had no grounding besides "what would trend on Dribbl that finally feels like a movement after years of iOS 7 aesthetic leading the way?"
That isn't a design problem.
"pure white background with overly dark blue", and neuomorphism was doubling on a very-not-skeuomorphic approach and attaching large shadows to it, simply because it created something "new" that felt "more realistic". No benefit to the user. No grounding in design principles.
With Material You, sure, it's flat, but it's skeuomorphic in that _it works how color works in the real world_. (cf. Round Rects are Everywhere https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_..., and replace with "Pure White and Black are Nowhere)
Source: I wrote this, and also this post is my opinion, I do not speak for Google or its design: https://material.io/blog/science-of-color-design