Hacker News Reader

Comment by arscan | Hacker News Reader

I'm not going to comment on the message as a whole, since this whole flat aesthetic thing has been argued up and down on HN over the last few months. But there was one line that stuck out to me as being a little off:

> Get rid of all texture, and you might end up with cold, sterile designs that scare users away.

I'm on board with the usability argument, but I don't think that removing gradients and drop shadows necessarily results in designs that "scare users away." If anything, I think that abandoning realism allows you more freedom in making a warm & inviting designs (e.g. some downright unnatural combinations of pastels that would look too busy with those touches of realism).

View on HN

but I don't think that removing gradients and drop shadows necessarily results in designs that "scare users away."

Try using Office 2013. It's white and flat (even flatter in Win8 over Win7, you lose refrence to what the 'tools' part and the data part is. It is not inviting at all, unless you dig in to the options and try to put some slightly different colors/textures on it.

It fails because it's been designed by idiots, not because it's 'flat'

Can't stress this enough. Bad people using a well-thought-out design aesthetic can still make something that looks like garbage.

I've noticed that most large companies go for a sterile look. Google, Microsoft, etc. I've always thought of Apple design as sterile as well.

Getting off track, Apple design is simply not a monolithic, "zen" one-stroke entity. Apple design amalgamates understated hardware with loud, lickable user interfaces. To see my point, consider that Apple hardware is definitely NOT lickable, whereas software generally is. Historically this may be due to the dissonance between Forstall (software design) and Ive (engineering design).

(Feel free to shred me as I don't really know anything about Apple design.)

The interesting thing is that the new Apple hardware starting with the iMac certainly started out as lickable, and very similar to the original OSX software (with pinstripes and all). Both the software (OSX) and hardware has gradually become more and more clean and "sterile" with time. The exceptions have mainly been certain applications and a few UI widgets / icons.

> I'm on board with the usability argument, but I don't think that removing gradients and drop shadows necessarily results in designs that "scare users away."

He didn't talk about gradients or drop shadows, he talked about textures. Wood grain is texture, the paper fibers in most book pages are texture, ... There is such a thing as too much texture, but there is also such a thing as not enough texture: when there's no texture, the work feels dead, like holding a single chord forever.

You can for sure create a nice design without using any texture, but still from UX point of view, depending on the complexity of the user interface, buttons with shadows will be more visible and easy to recognize for a user than flat rectangles. It is especially important when designing UI for buying things and making payments.

He said might end up.

The "might" there is simply a weasel word for the opinion presented.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com