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Comment by nszceta | Hacker News Reader

Too many people want "clean" and "modern" designs because they like the way it looks, usability be damned.

A lot of low skilled designers entered the workforce and they really fell in love with "clean ui" because it required so much less skill compared to making icons like these.

Yep. This is the uncomfortable truth: back in the heyday of Aqua, if you wanted a good icon, you had to pay a skilled artist about 40% of the sum that, today, gets you a full app design sketch.

Folks look at the cool designs from that era (and late '90s Windows) and want them back. You can't have that and $0.99 apps. If you try to get that kind of design with today's design budgets, you get exactly the kind of Y2K photo app skeumorphic design that everyone hated.

This may be true wrt. skeuomorphic Aqua-like designs, but pixel art with low native resolution and low color depth is the cheapest style of them all, only literal pencil drawings on the back of a napkin are cheaper. Look at SerenityOS for the kind of polished design that can be achieved with ease even by amateurs.

That is still substantially more expensive than flat/symbolic icons, simply on account of it requiring human effort. A substantial number of modern-style icons and logos that you see in the wild are obtained by (lightly) retouching the best our of a handful of auto-generated candidates. Since most logos are just "stylish" text now, and most icons are just variations on some letters/geometric shapes, there's a pretty lucrative grey market of tools that pump these out programatically.

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