
The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design - flowerlad
https://applypixels.com/blog/comeback
======
alxlaz
I don't really care about "fun", but I just can't find the words to explain
how happy I am that there's a chance we might put all this flat madness behind
us. I'm looking forward to:

* Not having this conversation with my mom (who, at 60+, is remarkably adept with computers but hey, we all run into trouble sometimes) over the phone anymore:

Me: Okay mom, now press the "Edit" button

Mom: Which one's the edit button?

Me: Uh, the... um, it's the one that kindda looks like... a bunch of lines in
a rectangle, I guess?

Mom: Alex they all look like lines in a rectangle

* Not hovering everything for five minutes until I can figure out what I can click and what I can't click (for bonus points: not trying to click something for five minutes like an idiot, only to find out it's a label, not a disabled button)

* Buttons, tree views, tabs and all that having relief borders again, not necessarily because I like _that_ , but because without it, the only way to "isolate" the information in them is using whitespace, and seven years of flat design hell later I can fit only slightly more content on my 1920x1080 screen than I could fit my Amiga's 1024x768 screen 20+ years ago.

* Being able to tell file types apart from each other when I'm browsing at minimum zoom level -- which is how you end up browsing _any_ collection of more than a few dozen items or so

* Being able to tell application icons apart based on what's in the icons, not based on colours. People keep parroting this idea that "symbolic icons are easily to tell apart from each other because they're so simple" but when _all_ icons are a letter or some anonymous symbol on a blob of colour, they _all_ look the same when you put a few dozen of them next to each other. Maybe they're easy to tell apart when you have like four 128x128px icons but when you have 40 of them in a tiny dock at the bottom of your screen, the only useful information they retain is what colour they are.

~~~
asadkn
The real problem isn't necessarily flat vs skeuomorphism - it's the
representations that are not really representative to everyone.

Try "Click that icon with the floppy disk to save." with a new user.

~~~
alxlaz
> it's the representations that are not really representative to everyone.

That's true of virtually every graphical representation in a computer
application. Save icon? How about _folders_? Where I'm from, folders (the
physical item) never took off. Even today, we use a sort of slimmed-down
binder for small collections of documents. For millions of people, myself
included, the folders in Windows 95 and Windows 98 were the first ones we ever
saw. That never prevented anyone from learning how to use them, or figuring
out what the "Open..." button does.

So yeah, "Click the folder button to open" never worked, for the same reason
-- no one had ever seen a folder. But the button was visually distinctive
enough that you could say "click the yellow button in the toolbar, it's way up
there on the left".

Very few icons are really globally unambiguous (and I still think designers in
the early/mid-'90s really had the right idea when they just put the frickin'
text next to, or below the damn icon). But making all icons look basically the
same makes an already difficult situation even worse.

~~~
the_other
Just my anecdote...

The folder metaphor helped me grasp what was going on. The first computers I
spent significant time with were BBCs. They had two filesystems: DFS and ADFS
(I think). The Advanced Disk Filing System had folders, but all the
documentation I found called them "files". Files could point to files and make
a tree of files. 11 year old me just gave up on this. Why would you want a
tree of files? Why should a file link to a file...? Nonsense.

Folders (in Gem and Windows) made MUCH more sense. Aaah... it's for organising
ideas. Bingo!

~~~
alxlaz
Yeah, things were very bad for 10 year-old me: in English, the slimmed-down
binder we use around here for, well, filing, is called a file. It made
absolutely zero sense that "a folder is a collection of files" and "a file is
a document". We didn't use folders, and a real-life file usually had _several_
documents.

It was pretty stupid but it made sense on its own after a while.

------
karaterobot
People sometimes forget that the move to flat design was not entirely
arbitrary and driven by fashion, it was driven by shifting technology and
usage.

Sure, fashion played a role, but in this case the main driver was the need to
support devices of different resolutions. Scalability implies vectors, which
implies shapes, fills, and strokes rather than bitmap assets.

As a designer who made "skeuomorphic" interfaces before the shift, supporting
even a couple of different device sizes with hundreds of different PNG slices
had already gotten unsustainable by 2010, and moving to a vector-based
workflow was a breath of fresh air.

The pendulum did swing a little too far: some of the early human interface
guidelines were wary of the concept of lighting (gradients and shadows). But,
realistically, that was unworkable, and those guidelines changed because
nobody followed them.

"Flat design" as a moment was actually pretty short. Later iterations on the
concepts explored during that moment, such as Material, were actually
thoughtful and workable, in my opinion.

~~~
dehrmann
> early human interface guidelines were wary of the concept of lighting

Someone needs to go out and patent using multiple ambient light sensors to
detect where light sources are relative to a screen, then shade skeuomorphic
elements accordingly.

~~~
SebastianKra
I remember seeing that implemented somewhere, but I cant find it.

Maybe someone can help...

~~~
spiralganglion
Some pre-7 versions of iOS would adjust the sheen on certain graphics (like
one of the Settings icons, if memory serves) based on the gyroscope, so as you
rotated the device the specular highlights would appear to move. Not exactly
the same, but similar spirit.

~~~
SebastianKra
Found it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIUMgiQ7rQs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIUMgiQ7rQs)

------
ChrisMarshallNY
Anyone remember Kai's Power Tools?

Now _that_ was an interesting UI.

[https://www.mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html?utm_sourc...](https://www.mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html?utm_source=designernews)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Does anyone know what happened to Kai Krause? Last I heard he was working on
Something Interesting, and then silence.

~~~
weinzierl
He lives in Germany in the 1000 year old castle he bought in 1999 from the
money he made from his ownership in the companies HSC, MetaTools and
MetaCreations. The castle was not in the best state back then and was restored
by Kai. Here is an aerial photo of the castle from 2009[1]. I lies on the
Middle Rhine, a very beautiful area.

[1]
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Burg_Rhe...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Burg_Rheineck_Luftbild_03.jpg)

~~~
ImprobableTruth
oh man, I didn't even know it was possible to just buy a castle. That's crazy
cool

~~~
conradfr
They cost a lot of time and money to maintain, that's why you can buy a lot of
them in Europe, in various state of damage.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
I live on Long Island, NY. It's the home of the "Gold Coast."

In northern Nassau County, there's all these 100+-year-old mansions, on a
gazillion acres.

Even though they are often owned by people that can afford the upkeep ("old
money"), they tend to get sold or donated to the county or state.

There's a few great museums:

[https://www.oldwestburygardens.org](https://www.oldwestburygardens.org)

[https://plantingfields.org](https://plantingfields.org)

[https://nassaumuseum.org](https://nassaumuseum.org)

and a few in Suffolk, as well:

[https://bayardcuttingarboretum.com](https://bayardcuttingarboretum.com)

[https://www.vanderbiltmuseum.org](https://www.vanderbiltmuseum.org)

They are a pretty big pain to keep up. There's also a couple that have been
abandoned, because the owners couldn't give them away.

------
rvz
Apple: We now have an all new redesign for macOS 11...

Designers: Apple's done it again, Time to adopt neomorphism in our apps and
the web, like we did with flat design and skeuomorphism.

Me: About this battery...[0]

[0] [https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/23/macos-big-sur-
battery-h...](https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/23/macos-big-sur-battery-
history-and-estimates/)

~~~
JoBrad
It looks like a baby bottle. Which might be an inside joke, since it’s sipping
power?

~~~
bigyikes
Looks more like a partially depleted uranium fuel cell to me... I hope that
isn’t the final design

------
caymanjim
I think Apple went overboard with minimalism, flatness, and lack of texture.
Walking some of that back is good. Recent Apple designs lack sufficient visual
cues to differentiate functions. Some things ought to pop in some way to draw
attention.

But "fun"? No thank you. All that cutesy crap they used to have was
distracting. There was no consistency at all. Yellow lined paper as the
notebook background? Winking emoji? UI elements that change size? A color
palette chosen by a toddler on LSD? This new "fun" is an unwelcome reversion.

Apple finally dropped their misguided cuteness in hardware design and ditched
all the rounded corners and pastel colors. Are they going to undo that too?

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
> I think Apple went overboard with minimalism, flatness, and lack of texture.

Never as much as Android in my opinion. Android went beyond flatness to
complete abstractness, all in the name of "minimalism". The
square/circle/triangle design decision was the most baffling example.

------
nathanaldensr
Of course this author's happy--they're a _designer_. Meanwhile, everyone else
has to absorb the burden of the "pendulum" ceaselessly swinging, retraining
their brains yet again to absorb new visual memories and habits.

There seems to be no such concept as "good enough."

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
Programming is currently hating on OOP, in love with strong typing, and
somewhere on the way from loving microservices to disowning ever to have
spoken in their favor. Ten years ago, it was the opposite.

So this particular quirk of thinking in groups doesn't seem to be confined to
the design domain. Nor do "swings of pendulum" preclude the pendulum also
having some forward momentum in sum.

Think of it as a skier's waving, or a sailboat crossing against the wind, and
the sideways motions is actually required for any forward motion to happen.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
I totally agree. I call it "throw the baby out with the bathwater" syndrome.
Usually some technology has a particular problem, probably not huge, but as
that technology becomes dominant, its warts start to grate on more people.

So someone comes up with a new technology and says "Look! It fixes all the
problems of Technology A!" And people who are new enough to the field who
pretty much only have experience with Technology A think it's great, because
this new thing fixes A's problems.

Meanwhile, though, Technology B has its _own_ host of problems, and oftentimes
those kinds of problems are the ones Technology A was originally created to
fix! And so the pendulum swings until you get enough years behind you on
Technology B where it's problems become apparent enough, so someone comes up
with Technology C, which is basically Technology A with more modern trappings.

Whenever you make a technology switch, be very cognizant about what you're
losing as well as what you're gaining.

~~~
sidpatil
What you're describing is known as the hype cycle.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle)

------
m12k
The problem with the shift to flat design wasn't that it stopped being "fun",
the problem was that there was a whole bunch of things being communicated to
users by the previous, non-flat designs that got lost in the transition, and
that flat design doesn't have a good alternative for:

\- Not using shadows and lines to separate panels, and using solid color
blocking or whitespace instead is much more confining, design-wise, and
greatly limits possible information density. Sure, all that whitespace looks
great in presentations, but it's like the difference between a designer
kitchen from a magazine and a place where I can actually cook.

\- Panels that are raised up or recessed using shading provide an obvious
hierarchy, giving users valuable cues as to the relation of the elements. With
shading and depth, it's obvious that items in this toolbar affect the items in
this panel below it, one is subservient to the other. With color blocking,
it's all just rectangles next to each other.

\- Buttons that are slightly raised up have an affordance for clicking, and
there's no way in hell you can confuse them for a label - it's much easier to
overlook that 'the label with blue text' is actually a button, while the label
with black text is just a label.

\- Ostensibly, a flat design contains fewer distractions. But ironically, in
reality, a human brain may have a much harder time understanding an interface
when everything is flat and looks alike, than when elements have depth and
distinctness to them. More information communicated does not always translate
into more cognitive load in processing it - often the opposite is true.

Sure, I understand the urge to rebel against skeomorphism (that faux-leather
in the iOS Find my Friends app was an abomination) but they threw the baby out
with the bathwater. I'm glad to see a lot of these changes being slowly walked
back with successive versions of iOS - in the linked article the comparison
between the "tabs" (segmented control) in iOS 12 and 13 really showcases how a
shaded design can look both less distracting and convey more information than
a dogmatically flat design.

------
aimor
"Pendulum swings" are going to shake off everyone else at different rates and
we're going to be stuck with an eclectic mix of designs. This already plagues
Windows (Ribbon, legacy settings) and Android (square, squircle, circle,
triangle icons).

I don't think people are able to distinguish between what's new and old
anymore. Aesthetics will finally be free from corporate trend setting and
maybe we'll feel comfortable doing our own thing.

~~~
dagmx
The difference though is that on Windows you have to specifically choose
visual styles to some degree.

On Apple systems, as long as you’re using the native frameworks, the framework
itself handles a lot more of the visual update.

Both methods have their pros and cons, but you’re less likely to see an
aesthetic divergence on iOS/macOS

------
Pxtl
I don't want visual design to be fun. I want it to be clean and consistent. I
would gladly take something in 16 color EGA with Comic Sans as its main font
if it would just stick to a rigid and clear design language.

I don't think if buttons are flat or lickable or shiny or bezeled or oozing
pus-filled nodules. As long as every button has the same styling as every
other button and nothing that isn't clickable has that styling? I'm happy.

Pick something and stick to it.

And people who want "fun" designs can go work on their blog.

------
caiobegotti
In case HN is bringing it down (as it seems to be the case now):
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200705130437/https://applypixe...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200705130437/https://applypixels.com/blog/comeback)

~~~
jrockway
What's weird is that it fails at SSL protocol negotiation; Chrome says it
can't agree on a SSL version or cipher.

This is weird because the cert is issued by CloudFlare, who probably shouldn't
fail TLS negotiation just because the backend is unresponsive. Very strange.

~~~
majewsky
On Firefox, I get SEC_ERROR_OCSP_UNAUTHORIZED_REQUEST, so there may be a
problem with CloudFlare's OCSP server (?!?). But this is because I manually
set security.ocsp.require = true in about:config. When I reset that to false,
the page opens fine.

------
mekster
Thank god the designs are being reconsidered from cheap flat looks but they
now kind of look like toys with rounded corners for everything and are all
square instead of having their own sizes.

I'd still take iOS 6 design any day for iOS.

Snow Leopard and iOS6 were their OS' peak.

~~~
throw_m239339
> Thank god the designs are being reconsidered from cheap flat looks but they
> now kind of look like toys with rounded corners for everything and are all
> square instead of having their own sizes.

All that hype around "flat" was just that, hype. Design needs texture and
depth, these are just core concepts of design. Doing away with texture or
depth because somebody in the silicon valley decided it was outdated means
that all these designers that jumped into the "flat bandwagon" didn't even
understand what their job was about: not following trends but ACTUALLY
designing for a public.

------
EGreg
Finally Apple has come to its senses! This flatness was like the touchbar.

People forget but the reason this minimalist design travesty happened was
political: Steve Jobs was no longer around, he had fired Scott Forstall
because of the bungled Maps fiasco, and he promoted Jony Ive, the hardware
minimalist who wanted to Bauhaus all the things.

This is what I wrote in 2016, if Steve Jobs still ran Apple:
[https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234](https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234)

Look, we may not need skeumorphism, but we need shadows. We need to know what
is part of the chrome interface and what’s part of the documents. When I was a
kid I joined the Apple Human Interface developers usenet group (anyone
remember those?) They used to be religiously against hidden modes (interface
modes which could not be discovered and navigated to by straightforward visual
inspection). Apple computers used to be easy to use for precisely guidelines
like these, which they proudly published. Heck, they even proudly touted the
small size of their phones for ease of access, which I agreed with:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Af0gtsjfy7E](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Af0gtsjfy7E)

They became hypocrites and trend-followers when they abandoned all these
things. Microsoft started the flat trend (and Woz praised them for it).
Android phones became “phablets” (which Steve Jobs derided). Apple became a
follower and didn’t even bother remembering what they claimed was the best
way, just a year earlier.

But then again, of course, Apple always did this even under Steve - claiming
RISC processors were far better and next year claiming Intel was better after
they switched. Claiming they invented the Omnibox in Safari years after Chrome
did.

But at least I am happy to see some of Apple’s original DNA coming back.

~~~
majewsky
> This is what I wrote in 2016, if Steve Jobs still ran Apple:
> [https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234](https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234)

You may want to install a spam filter on that comment section, or just disable
it.

------
risyachka
Sometimes you don't need to overthink it - design changes are required every
few years to make a product look fresh and new. Not because previous design
was worse, or not usable, or new is better, or boring etc.

~~~
dehrmann
The car industry has known this for years.

~~~
sidpatil
Automobile design has been heavily driven (pardon the pun) by two external
factors: safety and emissions regulations. These serve a practical
purpose/benefit to consumers.

------
caiobegotti
This kind of design ban lift is very welcome, as it brings a freshness to
things again (speaking as an user specifically), but I sincerely hope this
doesn't become a short-time cycle thing with Apple dictating the new UI motif
of the next 5 years only to change it back and then back again and back. My
memory of the change from skeuomorphism to a more flat colorful design is that
it was rather abrupt across UIs everywhere in the industry, not to say a bit
"traumatic" to some people probably.

~~~
kkarakk
well it didn't shift coz of apple alone, they're just the largest visible
adopters. as someone said in this thread, skeumorphism started looking really
strange and is tough to do on high rez screens and varying form factor screens

------
mojo982
I feel like I'm one of the few people who still likes flat designs. I hope it
doesn't swing all the way back to full skeumorphism. YouTube looks way better
than it did five years ago. What I do miss is efficient use of space.
HackerNews still has a great design, it's really efficient with space. Old
school iOS used space efficiently too, because it had to. It only had a 3.5"
screen to work with. I miss that.

~~~
sjwright
What I miss since iOS 7 is buttons that look like buttons. _BUTTONS THAT LOOK
LIKE BUTTONS._ Is that too much to ask!?! Why are we stuck with _sometimes_
plain blue text, especially when the use of that blue in UI "elements" isn't
even consistent with regards to function or behaviour.

~~~
JoBrad
As a user, I like where flat design has taken us, generally. But I absolutely
agree with you: the loss of “functionality hinting” (I’m sure there’s an
actual term for this, but I don’t know what it is) is pretty bad. You can
stumble around a design that isn’t in your language, if the cues are strong
enough. But all-text directions throw that right out.

~~~
kd5bjo
> “functionality hinting” (I’m sure there’s an actual term for this, but I
> don’t know what it is)

“Affordance” is the term you’re looking for:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance#As_perceived_action...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance#As_perceived_action_possibilities)

~~~
aGHz
It seems the term is in fact "signifiers". From your link:

> Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate
> where the action should take place. We need both.

------
Animats
This is too much like 1950s auto design. Tailfins for your phone!

In 1955, the auto industry caught up with the pent-up demand from WWII.
Suddenly, making cars wasn't enough. Now they had to convince people to
replace their old car even though it still ran. That's when auto styling
became exuberant. All the automakers had tailfins. Big tailfins.

Peak tailfin was reached in the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado. Tailfins then shrank,
until by 1965, they were completely gone.

Tailfins are what you do when you have no clue how to improve the product. By
1955, car engines had enough power, automatic transmissions and power brakes
worked, suspensions were smooth, and air conditioning was available. Getting
from point A to point B comfortably was pretty much solved. Solutions to the
hard problems in fuel economy, safety, reliability, and handling were not yet
available for production cars. So chrome and tailfins dominated.

------
musicale
I like discoverability and generally appreciate Apple's unified visual design
for macOS 11 and iOS 14.

However, I will miss the distinct outline shapes and silhouettes which have
made macOS icons easy to distinguish from each other since the original Mac
(really earlier than that, going back to the Lisa and Xerox Alto.) Now
everything's going to be an iPhone home-screen RoundRect.

Consider these distinctive silhouettes of Super Smash Bros. fighters:
[https://www.sporcle.com/games/skuban/super-smash-bros-
charac...](https://www.sporcle.com/games/skuban/super-smash-bros-characters-
by-silhouette)

Or the silhouettes from Apple's iconic iPod ads:
[https://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/ipod-
silhouettes-2000-2...](https://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/ipod-
silhouettes-2000-2011/)

------
andybak
There's a lot of middle ground between excessively flat and excessively
skeuomorphic. I don't want cartoon pictures and faux-wood textures on
everything. I just want things to look clickable..

Material design _almost_ gets it right. A bit more visual distinction between
interactable and non-interactable elements and I'd be happy.

------
vffhfhf
What if we could give complete control of visuals to user?

I use kde nowadays and the amount of customization is awesome.

I am using chrome OS theme with tela icon pack and a cool ass animated mouse
pack. And its frankly awesome.

I feel like Apple is stagnating.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
I kinda like the ability to customize the Linux desktop. But in practice, I
always end up with some major problems and many edge cases where my choices
just don't work.

A recent example was some web view showing a change log that respected the
font color settings but not the background, resulting in white-on-white text
with my dark UI.

I'm probably far more willing to spend time on such issues. But I never got to
a place where I felt I was "done". In that sense, Linux only demonstrates the
difficulty of UI choices, and how it may not be possible to leave it to users.
Hell, it's not even possible, apparently, to leave to application developers,
judging by the state of the non-customized Linux desktop. Design may be a
creative endeavour that requires a competent dictator, and cannot be done in
the bazaar-model of OSS.

(That, of course, is on top of the rather large number of flaws of any given
Linux UI. Seriously: after reading much praise and endless criticism of MacOS
here on HN, I gave (K)Ubuntu another shot. And the only possible conclusion is
that Apple and Linux are measured on widely different scales.)

~~~
shaan7
> And the only possible conclusion is that Apple and Linux are measured on
> widely different scales.)

+1

They are simply designed for different end users - and that is fine. I used
macOS for ~5 years before getting fed up with the limited window management -
but I understand why it is that way - most people don't care. So people who
do, can just use KDE et al, peace.

------
mensetmanusman
I wonder if Apple will ever let people install app icon libraries to change
the appearance of default apps. That would be fun (at least I remember having
fun as a kid doing that on Windows 95).

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
Remember that app in the 1990s that allowed heavy-duty customization of the
OS? Was it called Kaleidoscope? Can't remember.

I know that it could do things like apply a "steampunk" theme, where all the
scrollbars turned into brass poles, with green leather handles for the thumb
button.

Some of the themes were vomit-inducing (most of them, actually), but it did
have a couple of great ones.

~~~
compressedgas
Kaleidoscope
[https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/kaleidoscope](https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/kaleidoscope)

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
Yup. That's it.

------
antidaily
Yay for some depth to design. Nay for the overuse of drop shadows (especially
on Messages icon).

------
tuatoru
Nielsen Norman Group have been criticising flat design for a long time.

One of the major criticisms is that over time they cause even experienced
users to become hesitant and uncertain.[1]

That right there should have been enough to squash flat design.

[1] [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design-long-
exposure/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design-long-exposure/)

------
sandGorgon
here's a very interesting take here - about art deco being the design for the
next few years [https://vanschneider.com/art-deco-will-be-the-visual-
languag...](https://vanschneider.com/art-deco-will-be-the-visual-language-
of-2021)

However, I also believe that the Bauhaus way of using flat designs with
interesting shapes and motion will be an interesting path forward

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Whatever you think of Art Deco - and personally I loathe it, but that's
incidental - IMO it would be a tragic failure of imagination to try to
reincarnate a design style that's already a century old.

Likewise for Bauhaus design - also a century old.

There are hints of a new generative aesthetic - busy in an unhierarchical
repeated-elements kind of way, with organic influences - but that's better
suited to architecture and sculpture than commercial design.

There probably won't be a completely original design language until AR/VR
become ubiquitous - which will take a while.

~~~
sandGorgon
In a lot of ways, material design is Bauhaus.

------
coldtea
The post, describing the new iOS 14/macOS icons:

> _Some of them depict physical objects in a style that can only really be
> called skeuomorphic_

No, this style cannot really be called skeuomorphic. You cannot have
"skeuomorphic" icons. Neither etymologically or semantically.

Skeuomorphic etymological comes from Greek for "appliance like".

And semantically it's about GUIs (key distinction: GUIs, not icons or images)
emulating real world objects.

A movie player interface that looks like a real-world DVD player is a
skeuomorphic UI.

A movie player icon that looks like a TV set, or a Dick Utility icon with a
hard drive and a pair stethoscope are not "skeuomorphic".

They are merely life-like depictions.

Same way, if an icon for my "Horse" app (say, a note taking app) is a
realistically rendered horse, that's not "skeuomorphism". That's just an icon
with a plain old "realism" painting/rendering of a horse.

------
ksec
"Pendulum swings" , "Changes". Are these really the right word to use?

Apple has always had some from of Skeuomorphic in their design since its early
days. It was what Steve wanted it to be. Apple _felt_ that flatness were wrong
right after iOS 7 was released. An every year since then they have been
"walking back" those "changes".

Everything Ive changed all reverted back to Steve Jobs' era. Scott Forstall
wouldn't have left. Their Head of UI wouldn't have left. Apple Store changed
in design and layout, ( You could argued whether those are from Angela or Jony
) some of them are reverted back. Apple's Keyboard to literally no key travel,
reverted back to 1mm but still very shallow to the old 1.5mm. A large part of
Apple has spend a half a decade fixing their wrong directional changes.

I really miss Steve Jobs.

~~~
jsf01
What do you mean about the key travel on the keyboard? I’m not familiar with
the term in this context.

~~~
ksec
The depth of Key press. The previous keys on Macbook are 1.5mm in depth, the
distance it travel every time you press it, with roughly 60g of force. This
has been sort of the golden standard in keyboard on Notebook ( and in many
cases Desktop ) for more than a decade. Apple reduce that to 0.7mm in their
infamous butterfly keyboard in the name of thinner devices. For some that
might have been fine or even preferable. For many its typing experience is
much worst.

Due to its reliability problems ( which may not have anything to do with the
lower key depth ) Apple walked back on the design and uses a 1 mm Key travel
"Magic Keyboard". And from my experience it is pretty much the same as the old
Butterfly keyboard in terms of Typing experience.

------
kumarvvr
As with all visual systems, too much minimalism and too much noise spoil the
experience.

Ultimately, the context matters a lot. Not to mention the app, target users,
complexity of the app, and what not.

But I really hated those flat, borderless 'buttons' in earlier iOS versions.

That's just stupid design. It's minimal for sure, but functionally.

------
kkarakk
We're finally back on track to the cyberpunk "anything goes" vision i think is
gonna be the final winner of the design wars.

consumers don't give a shit about consistency. they want fun

------
reaperducer
There is still some "fun" left in macOS, but it's harder and harder to find.

Three examples: Enlarge the network icon for a Windows, or unknown computer,
and you'll see the monitor has a BSOD on it.

Enlarge the icon for Mail and you'll see the postmark on the stamp reads,
"Hello From California."

Enlarge the icon for Pages, and there's a fun little travelogue.

There used to be an Apple program that had the famous "Misfits" text on it. I
thought it was TextEdit, but it doesn't seem to be there anymore.

------
simon_000666
I’m not such a fan of all this Jony Ive bashing. It seems unfair to ascribe
the whole minimal/flat design movement to him. I remember reading that in
university he designed a pen with a part that was for ‘fiddling’ with in
meetings, completely non functional other than to satisfy people so I somehow
doubt he is the minimalist Puritan he is painted as in so many articles like
this.

------
treerunner
Bringing back skeuomorphic ornamentation is not “fun.” Susan Kare’s original
Mac icons, (bitmap icons, not that it matters), now those were fun!

------
BMorearty
Hooray! I am so happy to see this. Like the author, I’ve been hoping for
skeuomorphic design to return ever since it went out of vogue. I honestly
didn’t expect it to happen. I thought Apple would go even farther away from
it, eventually removing the beautiful shadow around each window.

With Apple’s flat design, you can’t even tell that buttons are buttons. They
just look like labels.

------
artsyca
Let me be the only leperous pariah in this thread to mention that the same
rationale can be applied to the way we dress, as a culture of design
professionals and engineers.

Because UI trends can come in and out of fashion but hoodies and T's are for
life I get it.

Any ex-military in this thread understand the importance of dressing up to
pass muster?

~~~
kkarakk
Except even hoodies are going in multiple directions fashion design wise.
techwear,leisurewear,exercisewear(as seen in avengers infinity war) etc

~~~
artsyca
Total bullshit. The hoodie went out with the tonsure in the middle ages. How
about rope belts, are they making a comeback too?

Ok. I'll concede the hoodie has some utility for beach culture but in the
office? C'mon.

------
gfodor
I see literally no reason why this new aesthetic was not possible to introduce
7 years ago. The mindset was there, the tools, and the culture. It’s puzzling,
and should be considered an epic failure imo.

------
gridlockd
I generally welcome this trend, but speech bubbles are not supposed to be
three-dimensional shapes like that. It makes no sense whatsoever and it looks
disturbing to me.

------
lurquer
The best design, of course,is and will always be LCARS.

Regrettably, nobody knows how it works or which buttons do what... but it
makes up for it with soothing beeps and clicks.

------
kps
> _They’re squircles alright_

I pulled out a ruler and they have flat sides, so — round rects are
everywhere!

------
mdoms
This makes perfect sense if you ignore the existence of every software vendor
other than Apple.

------
cletus
How about instead of "fun" we work on "fixing bugs" and "usability"? Just off
the top of my head:

\- I miss the old copy and paste UI that Apple originally had on iOS. The
magnifying glass worked so well. Now we have the "pure" design where you just
drag the cursor. This is partially obscured by your finger and it can be so
difficult to get that cursor between narrow letters (like "i" and "l", mainly
because they're sans serif pretty much always). If you overshoot you can
backspace and type in. If you go too far to the left you have to repeat the
whole process. It's just dumb.

\- Face ID is so dumb, I miss Touch ID. I get you want to have the full front
face for the screen. Do what Samsung did and put a sensor on the back. Apple
argues there are too many false positives on Touch ID. I don't care about
that. I do however care about all the false negatives on Face ID.

\- Let me control security. 5 failures of Face ID = a prompt for your PIN
code. I don't want this but I can't change it. Because of all the false
negatives I have to enter my PIN code way too often;

\- Swipe up is a terrible replacement to the Home button. Again, this is all
in the name of screen real estate. I've heard it says that design is the art
of compromise. What made the Macbook Air amazing was that it was the "correct"
compromise. Fast forward to Johnny Ive's war on thickness and you have the
disaster that was the 12" Macbook. That's what happen when you optimize for
one thing only to the extreme. So for the edge-to-edge screen we have this
swipe up nonsense. Why is it bad? Because which way you swipe depends on which
way the app is oriented. Some don't change orientation with the phone so it's
a side swipe "up". Some do but the trigger to change orientation fails for
some reason. The gestures to get to app selection (with a weird swipe up and
right) are strictly worse than a double press of the Home button;

\- I swear swiping for text entry continues to get worse. As one example, if
you try and swipe something and get, say, "Rome" instead of "tome", you now
have a capitalized word. Delete it and swipe in "tome" and it'll appear as
"Tome" because obviously you meant to keep capitalization even though you
never chose capitalization in the first place.

\- Often the keyboard will end up obscuring my messages, like iMessage fails
to account for it being there so I have to dismiss it and open it again and
it'll scroll up like it should've done. This bug has been around for months;

\- Flat design is stupid. The pendulum has swung too far from skeuomorphic
design. The whole point of the old design was to give _affordances_ to prompt
user behaviour. The designers have gone insane and completely thrown out this
key element of UI/UX design.

So before we think about "fun" how about we first tick off "functional"?

~~~
vxNsr
I agree with everything but swipe-up for home being bad. I find it to be a
much faster way to navigate apps over the home button.

------
marban
Apple is not bringing back the fun — designers & web decorators didn't have
the balls to push the barriers and surrendered to everything default with the
advent of Web 2.0. Screen design has been desperate for an 80s moment since
then.

------
toron123
Is it me or it looks like rip off of KDE.

------
MintelIE
Busy work for people who really shouldn't be in tech is what UI design has
become.

We had great UI, then tech branched out and we need to redo every UI
continuously so the marketing people (who mostly also don't belong in tech)
can boast of new and improved this and that. It's all so tiresome.

------
fmajid
Another benefit of that hack Jony Ive's departure, and yet more proof that he
was worse than useless without the firm grip of Steve Jobs to guide him.

And as to Ive, he cannot even claim to have originated flat design, it was a
slavish imitation of Microsoft and Google's design.

~~~
ericsoderstrom
Maybe I'm out of the loop. Why is Ive a "hack"?

