Hacker News Reader

Comment by afandian | Hacker News Reader

I find the current trendy 'flat' UI pastel-y colours, honestly, disgusting. Design is a matter of taste, and there's no accounting for other peoples' taste, but I am genuinely baffled about how anyone could like them.

Obviously someone does.

I wonder whether this is because flat design does away with all the helpful instinctive visual cues that were developed over the last decades (e.g. shadows, faux-3d borders etc) and needs to find new colours because there's no other way of expressing relationships?

Is it the case that designers have been forced to come up with 'more' colours under duress because of this, and have to try out new colours? Or is it that people genuinely like them? Or does 'like' not come into it? Or is there just one very influential designer at e.g. Google who has a different aesthetic to me?

EDIT: I'm commenting on the colours on the page linked to this discussion. Not colours in general.

View on HN

I'm a programmer not a designer but here's my $.02. As a user I like the flat UI concept not because of the flatness, but because of the colours. I'm tired of looking at grey all day and these provide a welcome change.

When I look at code in a text editor I prefer it to be colored. All white text on black puts me to sleep. It's also easier to see that this is not the same kind of thing as that.

I like colours too. I'm not talking about colours, I'm talking about these colours.

I do like these colors.

Design isn't about us liking those tastes or not. One part is about ergonomy of course, and the other is about looking up-to-date. Just watching the colors of a website/app, you could tell which year it was made and whether it's well maintained or not.

One could ask "Why do we define a fashion, given this fashion costs heaps to everyone in the industry and isn't necessarily nice or ergonomic". Remind that for every free land, humans will populate it, define rules and laws and regulations and fashions and richness, and whether it is good or not it can only go forward, with more laws, regulations, fashions and richness.

And taste only tells how close you are with society and how distinct you are from uniformity. http://xkcd.com/915/ So you must both stick to the trend and stay peculiar. The trend is defined by very few "haute couture" designers in the industry and we're only adapting it to our clients.

That's kind of my point. Do you like the colours (specifically these ones, or colours like them) because they're an alternative to grey or do you actually like them in and of themselves?

Some of them I like as colours, some I don't (bright teal for instance is just horrendous)

"As a user I like the flat UI concept not because of the flatness, but because of the colours"

I did an unsolicited redesign of a wikipedia article page a few months ago (mostly a tweak to the current layout). Although Wikipedia is a website rather than an app, the site's pages are are quite stark and many pages feel bereft of colour. In my (unsolicited) redesign I added colour to soften the appearance of the page and to highlight elements. Are the colours superfluous? Or do they make the page or site more pleasant to read? Opinions very welcome :-)

http://www.interfacesketch.com/wikipedia/

Website seems to be having issues. Connection is timing out. Would like to see what you did with it. I agree that wikipedia could use a redesign.

Sorry you're having trouble with the site. I just tried visiting and it loads ok at my end.

Here's a direct link to one of the designs (PNG image: the file is quite large at 2.7mb)

http://www.interfacesketch.com/wikipedia/wikipedia-article-r...

I like that design a great deal, and at a glance I find it subjectively more readable. I'd have to A/B test it with real wiki content for a while to be sure.

I don't think minimalism is going to be a trend. There are plenty of reasons why bevels, overuse of gradients, drop shadows and on and on turns users off. Though you might be used to something different flat design is easy on the eyes. Flat design is relatively consistent. There was never any consensus for example on how much drop shadow a button should have. Removing the shadow entirely eliminates one more point of inconsistency between experiences.

Older people are a great example of why consistency matters. Whenever I show my ageing mother a new website and it isn't incredibly clean + simple to look at it. Her brain shuts right off, she stares at it and waits for me to do something with it.

The first time she saw Android on her new Nexus she immediately was able to start tinkering with it. Flat design, limited colour and gradients, fewer distractions.

I don't understand the complaint about the colours being used on flat designs. Do you have your screen brightness turned all the way up? Turn it down you might notice how bland and grey a lot of older websites look - bevels don't save them.

I was talking specifically about the choice of colours. Not necessarily even criticising the flat UI trend.

Well then it's just a matter of taste, I like the nintendo-esque bright colours. If there is a bright green button, a bright blue button and a bright red button I feel what those buttons do before I even read them.

The colors at flatuicolors.com are anything but easy on they eyes. Furthermore, in the flat designs I have seen you find out that a rectangle isn't a button when you click on it and nothing happens.

Well if you can't tell if something is a button or not, that is a poor design. If you design consistently, and treat all elements of the same type the same way, there would be no second guessing. It's not even hard to do, just requires a bit of planning.

So what is the accordance for a button in a flat design?

It's up to the designer. But as long as it's used consistently through the design and it's different enough from other elements, your users won't have any issues.

Either one of these would work: http://jsfiddle.net/5u2j549q/

Where's the affordance in those? They don't look any different to badges.

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. With flat design, nobody knows you use MS Paint.

Hear, hear. Flat design is an awful trend. Removing functionality for simplicity - too many times 'flat design' has rendered applications almost unusable.

Removing functionality is not "flat design" that's just bad design.

I really despise opening Google Maps nowadays on my phone. There have been so many updates that cripple it and make it worse. Really hope someone comes along and puts a good replacement out. Recently it won't even show results on the map easily.

My search results come up as cards with a tiny sliver of map, then I click on the map and they all disappear, sometimes if I scroll around desperately some will load eventually. But all I wanted in the first place was a full screen map with some icons, not one by one cards to click, also with tiny slivers in them.

Not even an isolated incident. I takes half a dozen clicks when getting directions now as well and several other tasks. I don't think the Google graphics designers are being forced to perform usability studies like they should be. If they were, they would realize some level of 3D actually helps users determine what is clickable or not.

Couldn't agree more. It's just designers trying to justify their own salary.

I like interfaces that have nice 3D effects, especially on a window manager. I like high information density. I like being in control and having a customisable experience. Metro flies in the face of all of those.

> [lack of] high information density

This is one of the biggest crimes of flat design. Let's throw away all the opportunities for high information density and replace them with flat blocks of color!

> It's just designers trying to justify their own salary.

Seems a little unfair.

>> > It's just designers trying to justify their own salary.

>> Seems a little unfair.

Not when you've been using computers for 35 years and have seen it migrate from flat to nice to gratuitous and now back to flat.

The original bevels on buttons were a nice indicator that it was in fact a thing you could push. Lots of subtle cues were added in the late 90's and UI probably reached a high point. Then the graphics hardware got awesome and compositing with lots of effects became possible. These were used because they looked neat at first glance. Designers wanted to stand out and went crazy with bling. Then there was backlash, and now the trend is toward flat, simple, and frankly - in many cases - ugly UI. The pendulum is swinging too far back the other way IMHO. But not to worry, it will go back in time and we'll eventually have another high point. Probably better than the previous high since touch and swipe and all kinds of new things will be properly part of the picture.

You might be right about trends, but you didn't substantiate your lowball comment on salary whatsoever.

The “lowball” comment about salary was made by blueskin_, not phkahler.

Got it, thanks. The other guy did say: "Not when you've been using computers for 35 years and have seen it migrate from flat to nice to gratuitous and now back to flat."

No, it wasn't.

As a designer who also writes code, this attitude really frustrates me. There are a lot of reasons that flat UI makes more sense for software, especially for responsive web.

Flat UI means less code and easier maintainability. It holds up better across a wide range of sizes. It makes it easier to have a style guide in code and create reusable modules. This allows the design team to focus on the bigger-picture user experience instead of perfecting button gradients.

High information density is great in many applications, especially interfaces supporting complex tasks for expert users. However, it takes a lot of work to design a great high-density interface. I feel like most of the high density interfaces I see are more of a case of the design or product teams not being able to make hard decisions about what's really important.

While some flat UIs certainly go too far in the other direction, I firmly believe that minimalism encourages good design by forcing a conversation about what information to prioritize. Especially for the mainstream consumer web, this is almost always better for everyone.

Finally, I don't appreciate this kind of attack on my profession. Good design is far closer to engineering than to taste. I don't think I'm hoodwinking people into hiring me.

Not to mention, FD UI is more performant than anything else.

Can you point me to some data on that?

Here's a pretty cool article from High Scalability on it: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/9/29/instagram-improved....

Looks like they did a lot of other things at the same time (like not creating app-wide singletons up-front). It would have been nice to see numbers just for rendering.

Aesthetics are just as much a matter of taste as they are engineering. A lot of code frankly lends itself to such verbosity/elegance/simplicity/density/readability/(...) because of cultural:personal [preference, pedantry, experience, understanding, knowledge base].

Rather, I'm not so quick to have an opinion on aesthetics, because I think philosophically, beauty defines a balance between simplicity and engineering. Every part expresses itself perfectly.

There are ideals that work across the majority, and there are ideals that are appreciated by a niche audience. There is the Ideal, which is never achievable, and there is the expression of the Ideal, which always exists. Engineering or design, I don't see a difference. Different content, same concept.

So you're telling me what I like?

Nice one, apple.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com