There is widespread realization that people don't care about YOUR website YOUR company or how smart YOU are - you might want to stand out and be cool - but people want to do THEIR business be done with it and go on with their lives.
If I go to supermarket I don't want "shopping experience" - I want to buy bread and eggs - set your shop in a way where I can do it quickly and I will be coming back.
There are of course places/events where it should be an experience, like if I go to fancy restaurant I want "fancy dinner experience". When I am on the road and have to just eat something McDonalds does the job 10 mins and I am out even if it is not best choice food wise.
So setting up your page if it is webshop or streaming service - I don't go there to wonder how cool web design might be - I go there to buy stuff or start video.
Or the reason I walk two minutes farther to a different place for my shopping - they have self checkouts fueled by a single queue. Far more efficient than the closer and cheaper place.
Utility first, uncompromisingly always. This is why we still use terminals. This is why I drive a smaller less cool granny car. It's why people still ride old terrible singlespeed bikes in denmark, and it works. It's why messy desktop icons can be peak efficiency. It's why everything good is good.
I always make the "website" / "webapp" distinction. A website would be the landing page to a product, whereas a website would be like the site you posted. To the former i say go nuts, if I'm exploring a product and I land on your landing page, feel free to completely surprise me with web design.
However, if you operate a webapp, Spotfiy, Gmail, Amazon, etc, settle on a "core UI" and don't change it. People don't want creativity in these kinds of sites, rather they want consistency.
I guess it all boils down to, it's all about the time and place.
> I always make the "website" / "webapp" distinction. A website would be the landing page to a product, whereas a website would be like the site you posted. To the former i say go nuts, if I'm exploring a product and I land on your landing page, feel free to completely surprise me with web design.
The first occurrence of "website" in the second sentence was supposed to be "webapp", right?
I don't like this distinction much. The way you use the term website here is as a descriptor for splash pages nobody cares about beyond their use as a business card.
You can see it in the way you're talking about them like "they don't matter - so do whatever you want". And you're right.
But I find that unsatisfying. We should be able to have it both ways - interesting aesthetic alongside utility.
I love the McMaster website. It is very much function over form. It's clear that the website is a modern adaptation of the gargantuan multi-thousand page catalogs we used to have.
The website is built first and foremost as a way to find what you need. Buying online is almost an afterthought, there's one link in the header, and the only other indication that there even is an online store is once you click the exact item you want. Exactly where it should be.
It does exactly what it needs to and not much more. It's beautifully functional.
I'll go out of my way to avoid all self checkout stores. People here love to pull up their full carts and scan every item as slowly as humanly possible. But maybe in Denmark you aren't buying as much. I thought you rode crappy bikes because otherwise they'd get liberated immediately.
Depending on the situation, I can sometimes operate the U-scan and bag faster than a traditional checkout lane (especially considering the longer wait time for the two open lanes). I worked for quite a few years as a cashier though.
I'm in Ireland, I just use the dutch and danes as funny examples because they are the more regular cyclists but also have the shittiest bikes of any western country, thanks entirely to their topology.
Also, you don't have self checkout "stores" here. Essentially every supermarket has a self checkout section. You can just make your judgement call in there on the fly. It's pretty much always faster though even if someone has a decent sized load due to the shared queue system.
Wow, here in the USA, I never have issues like this. Where I'm at, all the people with huge carts filled with food go to the checkout lines. The only people who use the self-checkout are people with 1-15 items. There usually are at least 6 self-checkout terminals. I look at the checkout counter with a live employee and the are without doubt, always always always so much slower, because they will have 3 people in line with 50+ items.
I think if someone brought 50 items to self-checkout area, they would get knifed in the back.
There are usually at least 6 terminals, so if you have a incompetent idiot on one of them, it doesn't make too much of a difference.
I avoid self-checkouts because it almost always takes longer; something always goes wrong.
The ones I will never use are those which have a voice you can't turn off. Having to listen to those as I queue nearby, all I want for xmas is a HIMARS.
Absolutely. If they're not going to take the cost of the labor off my bill then I'm just doing them a favor by letting them hire one less cashier while shifting an unwanted burden onto myself.
The worker scanning and bagging my groceries is a service that makes my shopping experience more pleasant and less taxing on me. I'm not giving that up in exchange for nothing.
These days I try to avoid physical shops as much as possible. Here in the UK, we have a "supermarket" called Ocado. If you haven't heard of them, please look them up on Youtube[0]. They don't have any physical shops I know of, but have recently started stocking M&S products. They are known in the UK to usually be more expensive, but good quality. It might be the Whole Foods of the UK.
They run warehouses with a grid of rails and seem to be on a mission to automate as much of the logistics and delivery of products as possible. The website allows me to set up a regular weekly order, I can edit it up until the evening of the day before to add any last minute items. I think I pay £10 a month for unlimited deliveries over £40. Having someone bring a weekly food shop to your door for £2.50 is a great deal.
Not only is this a super easy to get food shopping done each week, I can do it from the comfort of my desk (great for when Retros get a little boring!). It also stops me impulse buying things.
I know I already have a December 23rd order coming full of Christmas food and I get to avoid the packed Christmas food shoppers and the depressing Christmas decorations and music in store (I'm a scrooge).
I don't want a better shopping experience, I want the best food, at the cheapest prices, delivered to me in a reliable way. I don't want to think about buying food any longer than I have to each week.
Hint: I recently cancelled the unlimited delivery service, and discovered that most of the delivery slots we use cost £2 or less and they suddenly started offering us lots of money-off vouchers to keep us coming back.
It's a shame they had to switch from Waitrose to M&S food. When they offered Waitrose stuff, it really was the best food and the best logistics combined. But the M&S quality and range are much less solid in our experience.
I did cancel my delivery plan a while back and noticed you had to go via support. No excuse for this in 2022 with such a modern setup. Obviously it was to retain me as a customer.
Do you eat the same meals each week? I prefer shopping in person, because it helps me fill in the days on our bi-weekly meal plan that I just couldn't come up with anything interesting to eat for supper.
There's a big difference between "grocery store is clean and nice" and "grocery store is setup in a cruel imitation of Ikea designed to force you to wander past every single endcap in an attempt to milk you for maximum dollars".
And this is why I don't like Trader Joe's, even though every member of my family thinks I'm crazy. TJ's is a mini version of an Ikea escape room masquerading as a grocery store.
I am willing to pay more to save time. I like my Trader Joes because I can browse every aisle in a matter of minutes. It's also a good place to discover new food items. Finally, this is a personal pet peeve of mine, but I am willing to pay more to not have a shopping cart with a bad or noisy wheel.
They choose more expensive shops arguing better variety or quality but in reality they just want to be in that group buying in more expensive brand shop, walking the same corridors as welthier or more wasteful people. In small towns they are afraid of being noticed by neighbours in cheaper shops - despite it being logically right place to see them, they feel their opportunities and prestige rises when they meet their boss in the same shop.
It escalated into creation of galleries milking young generation greedy of showing off. If displaying a hologram of your social media avatar with qrcode above your head was possible they would pay to do this, the more expensive it would be the more eagerly.
But of course there is also the middle class's deep wisdom of "the poor can't afford paying twice for a product" - pointing out modern quality problem. But every reason in time gets covered by a custom, for longer than reason exists.
There’s a high-end supermarket chain in California called Gelson’s. A guaranteed luxury shopping experience. Prices are 20-25% higher than Ralph’s and 15% higher than Whole Foods. Not worth it for me.
> If I go to supermarket I don't want "shopping experience" - I want to buy bread and eggs - set your shop in a way where I can do it quickly and I will be coming back.
You say that but I don’t think it’s entirely true. Ask around and people definitely have strong opinions about grocery stores. This one’s dingy and that one’s organized. This one’s cramped and that one’s too big. This one is laid out weird and that one is too bright.
Just because you’re not looking for a Disney-level experience doesn’t mean you’re not subtly affected (for better or worse) by all these little designed elements every time you go shopping.
My main point is that too many marketers/designers/software-devs think that their job is to provide "Disney-level experience".
Article names it "... these regressive trends ..." - so here I disagree because not everything has to be "Disney-level experience" or even fancy.
Yes I go for cleaner supermarket and do less shopping in murky ones but in a way that is discussed in article we discuss *supermarkets are all the same*.
If there would be a supermarket that has some fancy shelve design or tries to surprise me each time I go there I would not care if it is clean and cashiers are supermodels - if I would have to deal with too much nuisance of their shelves to get basic stuff pay and get out.
bread and eggs aren’t 100% fungible to everyone. So getting the right ones convenient for everyone will be hard.
Some people are solely focused on the dollar price of eggs and bread and don’t care one cent about other impacts, while some others factor in things like animal welfare or organic ag.
Accounting for the options makes it less cut and dry. Do items get grouped by cost level or by item category? Which gets most prominent placement? Is it consistent across stores? How many options is right for each product category?
> If I go to supermarket I don't want "shopping experience" - I want to buy bread and eggs - set your shop in a way where I can do it quickly and I will be coming back.
This is why I hated Flash: some designers would make the experience a game of hunting for the thing you want. Inevitably I'd just give up and not buy anything at all.
This happens in the real world too. My wife wanted a Bulthaup kitchen. They were happy to give us a big book with their product line. But it wasn't a catalogue with sections for sinks, cabinets etc. Oh no, each section was photographs (basically no text) of built-out kitchens. No product names, part numbers, or prices. If you were interested in something you had to go to the shop and point at the thing in the photo to discuss it with a salesperson. A terrible company to do business with.
You can find plenty of interesting UI design in video games: 3D animated menus, non-uniform layouts like radial menus, skeuomorphic design [1], etc. and they aren't difficult to navigate.
> I don't go there to wonder how cool web design might be - I go there to buy stuff or start video.
A gamer starts a game so they can play it, but that doesn't stop designers from making the menu both creative and easy to navigate. They aren't mutually exclusive. If game designers can do this, then why can't everyone else?
McDonald’s is a very bad example in this case as they have very distinct store fronts and branding and pioneered the whole fast food shopping experience.
They are very much a success on the shoulders of doing it differently.
McDonald's used to have very distinct storefronts, but they started remodeling most of them recently and could just as easily be a Starbucks if you replaced the yellow accents with green accents.
Agreed. Personally, I like the experience of going to McDonald's with friends. It is a comfy place to hang out, without feeling the pressure of staff trying to turn over tables.
Cite some of those counter examples. Not being snarky. It would be nice to see what those counterexamples are. Good to see a topic from opposite perspectives.
There are companies that deliberately aim to serve as efficiently as possible. A lot of thought goes into communicating and delivering on that promise in everything these companies say and do. Letting people get what they want efficiently isn't that easy to do.
Bad branding is when there's a gap between what a brand promises and what you actually get. A store that promises efficient shopping but just puts stuff on shelves in wrapped packs of twelve, isn't really helping you efficiently get what you want. There are indeed a lot of examples of this (in all industries). But that's because these companies don't put any thought into what they want to be seen as and how they can (continuously) deliver on their promise.
So the promise itself (e.g. "no-frills supermarket" or "amazing shopping experience") is irrelevant, as long as the promise is fulfilled.
Whether there is a market for a promise is another thing altogether, but we're discussing whether positioning your store as the most efficient place to get what you want is detrimental to the brand, which it isn't, as long as you deliver on that promise.
One would think that "people want to do THEIR business be done with it and go on with their lives", but actually people fall for branding and "aspirational" themes more often than not. Especially the people with the money.
Think of a time in the past. Say the 70s. Did everything look the same? Maybe not as converged as now, but still, if you walked into a 70s bathroom you'd be like "This is a 70s bathroom". You could probably look at most cars from the 70s and say it was a 70s style design.
Trends follow fashion and capability and regulation. Cars all look the same now because they need to achieve a certain industry wide mpg set by regulation, therefore they follow the same aerodynamic constraints, leaving the makers with the same limited room to make a difference.
Room design follows fashion. You can have whatever you like, but when you want to sell a place you need to appeal to the mass market and so you go with the current up-to-date look.
And things like AirBnBs all having succulent plants and Nespresso machines - people like plants and succulents are the easiest to care for, people like coffee and Nespresso is cheap and easy to provide.
Many things are just waiting for some technical capability. Like folding phones - we'll get a flurry of interesting designs, but if they work out then eventually they'll all converge on the design that works.
>Think of a time in the past. Say the 70s. Did everything look the same?
No. At worst it just had a few shared aesthetics (which we associate with the 70s look). But far more divergence. And even the aesthetics were way more open ended (e.g. the color palette was huge, now it's white, gray, 4-5 pastels and generall very similar-looking hues that dominate most industries).
Look at the brand logos for fashion brands in the TFA, for an example of logos looking unique in the past and then changed to totally homogeneous.
You're right, this process has always happened. But I think these days it's different in that it is almost completely globalized, whereas before you would have different trends in different countries, and trends are able to spread more quickly, resulting in less experimentation/differentation by those who aren't aware of the trend yet.
I definitely believe wide availability of the internet helped with that. Nowadays you can easily look up what a home in any country looks like and get a bunch of images.
> Cars all look the same now because they need to achieve a certain industry wide...
Cars seem to be all the same color these days too. Unfortunately, I think it's not just engineering constraints that are giving us "blanding" but a type of corporate marketing bean-counter that minimizes risk by selling to the lowest common denominator demographic. Apparently that LCD likes metallic-grey cars.
I'm disappointed that marketers (and perhaps too the buying public) have become so risk-averse when it comes to styling.
Part of the car color thing is how secure people feel financially. When they feel good, they buy a color that speaks to them. When they don't, they buy a color with resale value, black, white, or gray.
A few months ago we switched from a small dark blue hatchback to a bigger silver grey SUV. At the time I didn't really think about the color. Then I had a conversation with our neighbour and he pointed out that silver grey is an excellent color for a daily driver - small scratches are practically invisible and so are the tacky chrome accents. So, yes, I know I'm driving the most boring looking car on the road but I do like the practicality of it.
Fashion trends come and go but homogenization has clearly increased. In the 1970s, you could tell the brand of a car immediately by looking at it.
One difference was that retail branding was designed to be seen large: billboards, large print ads, TV. Now it is designed to be seen small, on phones.
Also, in the past, when you traveled, places felt more different: you didn't always see the same stuff everywhere.
I think that has a large role to play -- every "decade" / time period has had its identifying aesthetic qualities, trends that have been picked up and adopted en masse.
Perhaps in the early 2020's the trend is corporatized blandness, the naked skeleton of capitalism showing through skin as thin as profit margins.
Cars mostly look the same now because they're in the final stages of commoditization, the same as with phones. They converge as their designs reach "peak appeal" of 80% for maximum profits. Then the niche producers carve out from the remaining 20%.
Airbnb apartments are tending towards the "hotel room" look because that's what most of them essentially are. However, every Airbnb I've been in over the past few years has not looked anything like that, so I suspect some bias from places the author goes.
Interior spaces most definitely don't look the same. I think this is just the author extrapolating from their Airbnb experiences. The middle class homes will definitely look similar because they all use the same source material (same as they always have - just websites now instead of interior decorator magazines).
Consumer brands are all over the map, just like they've always been. And it's not like we haven't had bland brands like General Mills and Polo and Sears for ages.
Apps and websites follow the trends because that's what you do in the media space. Nothing new there.
Why do so many cars look so angry? Big front grilles that look like a growling, howling maw full of teeth, bulging, muscular body shaping... It's like car designers all got together and decided that aggressive-ugly is a good look.
The anger is cultural. For some examples, look a sporting team logos - from school-age teams all the way to professional. Half look like they are about to bite your head off and the rest look constipated.
I think a significant part of road rage is due to conflicting metaphors. Children are taught to "wait in line" and "take your turn". The lanes on roadways emphasize the "wait in line" - but there is no line. So when people pull in front of you, they're violating a deep-seated upset-ness that they are cutting in front of you. But there is no line - so it is impossible for them to "get to the back of the line". I could write a very long essay on these conflicting metaphors and how our tricksy monkey-brain and lizard-brain are perceiving and sending conflicting messages.
Additionally, the semi-anonymous nature of driving has the same lack of feedback that posting on the internet gives. You will say and do things that you would never say/do to another human in front of you.
Add to that an appalling lack of driver education/training in the US and the question should rather be "why is there so little road rage?"
Finally, the public policy has been to make things so spread out that car ownership is mandatory. Zoning requires f(X) number of parking places if your business location can handle X number of customers. This is why all businesses (both retail and office) look like a box in the middle of a parking lot.
Some combination of "angry" grilles and the pseudo-anonymity of driving makes people act like complete animals. A fun one I noticed was driving to the beach this summer. In the parking lot, there was a tension in the air that a fight could break out at any second for a parking spot. People were driving aggressively, cutting each other off, honking, having their passengers get out and stand in a spot to "claim" it, etc.
Then, they got out and walked 50m to the beach. Instead of fighting for a "spot" people just move along peacefully. There was no tension, no aggression, just a few thousand people getting sunburnt in peace.
I'm not sure what the point is, but it really made me think about how strange our behaviour is. As soon as we're back in "human scale" environments, we go back to behaving like humans.
When I'm driving my car, if I feel myself getting angry at another driver, all I have to do is get close enough to see them, and the anger sort-of melts away. It's like it suddenly dawns on me that there are actual people in there, and that my anger was misplaced.
It's not the car designers, it's the consumers that voted with their wallets by mostly buying angry cars. Apparently car drivers feel a need to intimidate the road users around them...
Japanese manufacturers make a lot of cars that don't see any markets outside of Japan, and some of those are just delightful. There's also a level of pragmatism for some of them that doesn't make it to markets like the US or Australia. Kei cars, oh my, that's all I need!
I’d love a stupidly happy looking car such as the Microlino: https://microlino-car.com/en/microlino Driving is ruined for my by aggressive looking huge cars.
> Why do so many cars look so angry? Big front grilles that look like a growling, howling maw full of teeth, bulging, muscular body shaping
I am convinced that the omnipresence of this style is going to make the rounded and friendly cars of the early 2000s increase in value in the coming years. Heck, they're only a few years from being eligible for historic plates at this point. My flaming hot automotive take is that the much derided "fried-egg" headlights of the late 90s and early 2000s era Porsches are actually great, and offer a nice contrast to the super-angular headlights we see today to create that aggressive look.
Sad to see this downvoted. There's a real core of truth there. The fact that millions are salivating over cybertruck, which design is a celebration of dystopian sci fi warfare aesthetics, proves your point.
Technology creates the conditions of its use. Aggressive looking cars nurture a culture of aggressive posturing, which in turn drives people to buy even more aggressive cars.
I'm interested in the cybertruck not because it looks agressive but because it's the ultimate "function before form."
99% of cars on the road are ugly anyway, why are we compromising efficiency for the sake of making slightly less ugly cars? I don't want to car to have nice curves, I want it to be cheaper to make. I don't want the paint, I want the frame itself to be rustproof.
What do you consider the function of the cyber truck?Isn’t it the opposite? I would consider an extended bed single cab pickup truck to be the ultimate functional truck.
The function is a bit more meta that that. It's easier to manufacture because you just fold a giant sheet of metal. You also get rid of all the work and costs associated with painting. In theory this should bring down the price.
In terms of user function, the idea of a rustproof car really appeals to me since I live in Ontario and cars get literally covered in a thick layer of salt in the winter.
The exoskeleton also allow you to have more room inside.
As you probably noticed, I don't care much for it as a truck. I would prefer the same thing as a car, but hey, you gotta start somewhere. Hopefully this will tricked down to cars someday.
Wonder how much of the appeal varies by generation. For me, it has a 90s nostalgia feel to it. I had lots of fun during the 90s playing early 3D games, which for technological reasons, had low polygon counts. The Cybertruck very much looks like it would fit into games like Descent and even further back, Battlezone. These are fighting games but having fire buttons on the steering yoke doesn't come to mind, the good times I had with friends playing 90s games is what it make me think about.
The original was about cars, not pickups. For pickups the standard was magazines started pulling the max weight trailers up pikes peak (a long steep grade) on a hot day with the AC on (I was going to write at the speed limit, but I suspect they are going faster than legal speed just like everyone else). Without those large grills there isn't enough cooling and the engine will overheat forcing you to slow down. Older trucks could handle this grade and drivers just slowed down a bit - which is the safer thing to do anyway. (either that or you should have a semi-truck - including the additional training required to drive one)
Which is what's caused a size-war with cars. Your own safety by being the bigger car comes at a detriment to someone else's safety, and as cars, especially trucks, have gone off the deep end in this regard they've become downright negligent.
I say this as a benefactor of the bigger-car-wins situation, as my father is still with me by virtue of being in the bigger car recently. It's selfish but it's also sensible if everyone else is going to be in a bigger car, and so I think it's something that could only be curtailed by regulation.
If you're comparing a new Camry to a 1970s Cadillac, sure. Sizes have increased within each product line (see original mini -> modern mini, porsches) and the types of vehicles available in each niche have also grown larger (Scion xB -> kia soul, Toyota pickups -> f150s). The overall trend has been for increasing sizes.
I feel safety standards should not only take into account the damage done to occupants of the vehicle in case of accident, but also the damage done to occupants of the other vehicle (and pedestrians, cyclists, ... ). To a certain extent this is probably already the case, but I think it should be much more important.
My buddy bought a Miata some years back with an "active bonnet" specifically designed to react to hitting a pedestrian. I believe it was only installed on the American version because it's an EU requirement.
It is already the case but it's a process full of massive compromises. There's not much you can do to stop an F150 from annihilating anything it hits.
I think the best defense for pedestrians, cyclists and even other cars is the design of our roads. Stroads are a great example of the worst possible outcome: deadly, fatal speeds, poor separation of different traffic flows and zero defense for pedestrians. Where there's conflicts of interests between cars and other users of the space we should be deferring to those other users, not letting cars fly through city streets at 30mph with naught but a bump of concrete protecting everyone else.
There are 4 sections in the EuroNCAP tests (European safety standards). One of them is about damage done to pedestrians and cyclists. The others are: adult occupant, child occupant, and safety assist features.
The latter includes the annoying seatbelt warning, that's why most (all?) cars sold in Europe have it.
The standards only take into account collisions with cars in the same size class. That's why tiny cars can still have perfect crash test ratings but be absolutely destroyed in a collision with anything significantly larger. You can look at driver fatality statistics for various makes and models and the numbers for smaller cars are like 10-50x higher than larger ones.
> It's like car designers all got together and decided that aggressive-ugly is a good look.
It’s called market research. Marketers will influence designed based on surveys. The outcome in the past tended to be terrible until the rise of Japanese brands
> Interior spaces most definitely don't look the same.
I like to watch real estate videos. In the high end certainly everything looks the same. You cannot even tell them apart if they mixed up the videos, zero local aesthetic, and generic contemporary grey minimalism seems to be what people want
But you don't want to be too drab. We almost passed on our current house because the newly applied paint was boring grey. We did buy it, but only after deciding it would be painted before we moved in. If they had put in some color - any color we would have lived with it.
I want to replace the grey vinyl floors, but it is hard to justify that cost.
Paint is cheap, relative to the probability and cost of finding a similar house you like, where you like, in the timeframe you want it. Flooring is relatively cheap too.
I would never pass on a house for those reasons, at least not where I live since supply of alternative houses is so low.
Then there is a net loss of an extra redecoration: one to prepare it for sale and another to prepare it to be lived in, rather than just one by the new owner.
>Cars mostly look the same now because they're in the final stages of commoditization
Consolidation, not commoditization. Cars aren't barrels of oil or truck cars of coal.
It's just impossible to compete as a car company unless you are very niche, a billionaire or a state. The big 3 vertically integrated to the hilt and erected monumental barriers to entry and then became very, very conservative.
What big 3? I can count at least 8 brands off the top of my head which sell a variety of vehicles. Tesla started relatively recently, and I have seen a few Rivian around. Kia and Hyundai made large gains in the last 30 years.
Most car brands you know of are owned by just a handful of the others. A perfect example is that Kia is owned by Hyundai Motor Group, who also own Genesis. There are definitely more than three though, I will give you that, but it is definitely a story of consolidation over the past 30 years.
And yet Tesla is out there with the highest market cap of them all, which contradicts the person I replied to that there is no variety or an impossibly high barrier to entry.
We have numerous Korean, Japanese, German, and American vehicles on the road with many varieties of sizes and performance.
And obviously you will need to have deep pockets to enter the car business, why wouldn’t you for such a complex machine? That does not mean there is excessive consolidation in the market.
Automakers are measured by units sold and Tesla ranks very low on that list.
When Toyota sells 10 million cars a year it's not news, they have basically reached peak growth. Tesla's valuation is higher because they keep selling more cars and still have room for growth (and because of Elon Musk himself).
Commoditization is the right word to use imho. I think OP is using it here in more broadly philosophical (marxist) sense; a reductive process which makes mass manufactured products essentially interchangeable in the market.
The only differentiation that can arise then in is in terms of branding. That's exactly what cars are now. Identical metal boxes, captured by marketing, purely differentiated on intangibles like brand identity.
And even this differentiation is becoming less and less relevant. How many people still really care about their cars? (mostly men do, and even that's waning). They're basically washing machines now.
In almost every company I joined, the common approach to design anything is to look at what everyone else is doing and copy it.
"Google does it this way, so we should too".
"Facebook has spent millions on research and decided to do it this way, we should copy them".
If you do anything different, you are immediately questioned:
"Why are you doing it like this? No one else does it this way".
The tech industry is basically controlled by non-tech and non-design people who have no unique sense or taste in anything to speak of. Even self-branded "UX Designers".
I’ve enjoyed some UX PhD research seminars, and I think something needs to be said for the legitimate UX research being done. (You wouldn’t believe the thought/effort/testing that can go into the shape, color, details, etc. of a web app button.) For example: Amazon’s app structure (for their main online shopping experience) has been tested ad-infinitum by people who know what they’re doing. If you’re designing a similar shopping experience, it’s not “copying Amazon” as much as using the state of the art in shopping experience design.
There’s no deductive logic that says “Facebook has spent millions on research so it’s correct”, but common sense says this isn’t a bad strategy. UX research is a legitimate undertaking, and Facebook definitely had the chops to hire people who have invested their education in understanding the nuances of when to use which design elements. It’s literally a science.
UX design (I’m not speaking of other aspects of design) isn’t really a creative process as much as an engineering discipline. There’s a best way to achieve any particular outcome. Maybe taste is involved in where you hide the rubbish of your application, but the basic functionality has a “best flow”. Copying one of the giants is the best way to get this flow for the average person.
The Amazon shopping experience was actually heavily dictated by Jeff's personal viewpoints, with the (correctly stated) very talented UX designers only being able to operate within that space.
It may be state of the art, but it doesn't mean that there aren't alternative perspectives which would be equally as successful if given a shot.
My understanding is that part of the interview loop (for software engineers without significant UX experience) is to ask what can be improved about the UX. The correct answer (in the loop, from the perspective of the interviewers, according to my understanding) is “nothing; it’s as good as it could possibly be”. This doesn’t exactly agree with what you’re saying because there are potentially better alternatives outside of Jeff’s ideal (I’m not too worried about it as both of our positions are reasonable).
Amazon is one of the few UI's I don't have major gripes about, so good on him.
Personally, designers SHOULD be more restricted, the problem space itself should restrict what they are able to do, but it often times isn't.
At one point someone decided the shuffle button for the iphone needed to be hidden for whatever reason. I wish the designers had been restricted by someone's personal wishes during those discussions.
Not sure if this is trolling. Please don’t be mean to me. Your comment is abrasive.
I can assure you that engineering departments do in fact teach classes in which the lecture material is based on research regarding the color and other aspects of design elements. The parent discipline is “human computer interaction”, and “user experience” is a narrowing.
I’ve sat through an hour long presentation about a single button used to meet an accessibility mandate in California. The presenter spent months employed with the purpose of designing the button and designing tests to ensure the correctness of the button. The size, shape, color, and sub-images of the button all contribute to its effectiveness.
Coming up with the iPhone as a creative example of UX doesn’t make me wrong. It’s at the intersection of design and engineering in the same way UX scientists have to brainstorm research directions. My comment was specifically regarding the formal field of UX as a subfield of HCI, and it’s correct and relevant to the subject matter of the article in that websites and apps look the same because there is a state of the art in the engineering discipline of UX.
I used to work in UI (within game development) and there are very good reasons for this. Almost every time someone decided to do something different, usually thinking themselves innovative, it meant disregarding conventions and confusing and frustrating players. There were some exceptions, but experienced designers know when to stick to conventions and the short of it is "most of the time".
The most frustrating experience for our team was regarding the design of a widget meant to convey a number of properties and statistics about some in-game object. Our very experienced Senior UI Designer came up with something which was simple, clean, and looked great.
A manager without UI knowledge didn't like it and mandated that it was replaced by his own unique vision, despite protests. This resulted in half a year of iteration and tests, bumping against problem after problem which needed to be solved. Readability, contrast under different circumstances, data edge cases, you name it.
Meanwhile, our senior designer was forced to follow along, protesting and reminding everyone at each step that he had a perfectly fine solution to begin with. In the end, after months of painful iteration the manager had a brilliant idea, suggesting a fix for the final remaining issue. He had now, by ordering our Senior Designer how to perform each iteration and then evaluating it together, designed the perfect widget. Our senior opened up his original rejected design and showed that it, indeed, followed that specification to a T.
> I used to work in UI (within game development) and there are very good reasons for this. Almost every time someone decided to do something different, usually thinking themselves innovative, it meant disregarding conventions and confusing and frustrating players. There were some exceptions, but experienced designers know when to stick to conventions and the short of it is "most of the time".
Well here's why you're wrong!
hint: you're not wrong. Even as a technical person it drives me nuts when interfaces change for the sake of it.
I've come to dislike designers over the years. Not because I dislike designers, but because it seems like form has taken too much precedence over function and often that form changes as the old guard is replaced with the new.
> I used to work in UI (within game development) and there are very good reasons for this. Almost every time someone decided to do something different, usually thinking themselves innovative, it meant disregarding conventions and confusing and frustrating players.
This is very easy to disprove:
UI design follows trends.
The current trend is flat UI, so everyone is doing it. Before that, there used to be a different trend, and everyone was following it.
These trends have nothing to do with helping users.
Doesn't flat UI confuse and frustrate users? My contention is that it does, yet everyone is doing it.
Constant popups to remind people to sign up for news letters? Frustrating.
Too much negative space and not much useful functionality on the UI? Confusing and frustrating.
Hiding features that people want to use all the time behind a hamburger menu?
Removing functionality all together because the designer couldn't figure out a way to fit it into his design?
Almost everytime some application does a "redesign" to "modernize" their UI, they do it by following current trends, and the result is an objectively worse UI:
- Users are confused and frustrated.
- Previously accessible functionality hidden behind more menus or removed altogether.
- Slower/Jankier overall performance.
Really nothing about it has anything to do with caring about the actual user experience.
One wonders how much the original could have been improved by starting with that, and then testing. Of course a senior designer should get close to ideal, but taking a good start and then testing normally reveals minor flaws.
Usually the designer in question could do that, but... Let us just say that the manager in question was the reason several people quit and at least one person was fired for insubordination. He was not reasonable or easy to work with.
Playing devil's advocate here : it is sometimes desirable to reuse a design that your end user's are going to be familiar with.
So there's a tension between "being boring and usefully" and "being original at the cost of forcing your users to adapt".
Case in point : I had to explain a feature yesterday to a user, and it's complex and not trivial, and what basically saved my day was saying : "it works like in X".
Like games, wasd is movement, so every other game copied that. If you try to change, people are going to be mighty confused why the controls aren't "normal".
WASD movement is an innovation. Movement was on the arrow keys before that.
A wave of games that wanted you to play with the mouse and keyboard simultaneously made using the arrow keys impossible, unless you wanted to use the mouse with your left hand. If the auxiliary part of the keyboard had been to the left of the main part instead of the right, movement would most likely never have come off the arrow keys.
PC shmups, mostly of PC-98 and MSX traditions, never stopped using arrow keys. New ones released this year still use arrow keys for movement and Shift+ZXC for action buttons. Probably because the mouse was never relevant for that genre.
I think WASD came from two player keyboard only games before the mouse existed. Player one was WASD (or something else), player two was the arrow keys, or something like IJKL (it has been a few decades since I played a game like this so I don't remember)
It's also a good example of how copying a design without fully unerstanding it is a bad thing.
A common complaint from the French is that games have messed up movement. Why? The French keyboard looks like this:
A Z E R T
Q S D F
W X C
Obviously, you can't use WSAD on that. As a designer, you have to understand that you're after the placement, not the labels.
Even if you rely on scan codes, you're only guessing the button placement. They can be arbitrary, as long as user's key map matches.
Now you're down to arrows. They have an embedded meaning: directions! You can rely on them being placed in a way that makes sense to the user, even if it's not necessarily the standard WASD positions.
Yes, trying to guess the appropriate version of "wasd" based on either the locale or the actual keyboard layout is a design decision.
But, again, if you're going to say "you can use the left part of the keyboard for directions", then you have different options, it's just probably safer to use wasd for QWERTY, qsdz for AZERTY, etc... rather than anything else.
Scan codes should be the main solution, not arrows. Keyboards that change the actual key placement so badly they can't be used are very very rare. Needing several buttons in addition to the movement keys is very very common.
Even if you're worried about weird layouts, the biggest issue you'd see by far is keyboards that don't have arrow keys!
Scan codes might be the main solution, but why are arrows not a solution? If the keyboard has no way to input arrows, I'm sure it's by user's choice, who's very aware of that :)
Even controllers assign buttons a meaning, rather than location.
> Like games, wasd is movement, so every other game copied that. If you try to change, people are going to be mighty confused why the controls aren't "normal".
Sometimes though it is for the better. A lot of games in the 80s, especially on ZX Spectrum, etc, used QAOP for movement (QA vertical, OP horizontal) for some reason.
Of course the best is to have these configurable - both the Speccy games of yesteryear and modern games allow you to change the controls to your liking, so people who for some reason still prefer QAOP (is anyone still out there, i wonder) can still use that scheme in modern games.
The issue I have with this is that design is typically domain specific. What works for an everyman-search engine might not be a perfect fit for an accounting software, an professional team managment tool or an powerplant control software.
A design targeted to the occasional user can spectacularily fail for power users that use the thing 4 hours every day. Sure it is easy to understand and self explainatory. But this is an advantage once at the beginning and might cost your users every day after that.
Having a steep learning curve is not a feature, but sometimes easy to use means a UX sacrifices fast and efficent workflows (cue notepad.exe vs vim).
Sure, notepad.exe is easier to use (and probably has more users in absolute numbers) than vim, but if your target group is power users, guess which one might feel more worth investing into for them?
VIM should be compared with an editors that has a bit more power. Kate (from KDE) perhaps (there are other choices, Kate is one I've used)? If all you need is the features of notepad, then notepad is strictly better than vim - highlight-copy-paste and save being the only features, and notepad using standard key shortcuts is easier to learn than the vim keys. (note that gvim has menu options for those so you don't have to use the vim keys - I'm not sure if it supports the standard control key shortcuts).
However if you are programming all day vim has a lot of powerful features that notepad cannot touch, so if notepad is your other choice of course it is worth learning. However if your other choice is something more powerful - it turns out there are programmer editors that are just as powerful and a lot easier to learn. The question then becomes is it worth spending hours learning all the commands - including for things you rarely use - for the few ms it saves you each time you use them. (make sure you check with a stopwatch - people often feel that something is faster when the stopwatch says otherwise - as any UX engineer should know, but most vim advocates do not admit)
My point was only that some things need to be simple and self explainatory, even if it creates friction and reduces the power, because:
A) they are not used all that often so the friction does not matter
B) the thing is public and must be usable by potentially everyone
On the other hand some things that are meant to be used for hours at a time should make the same tradeoff between reducing the one-time mental burden vs reducing the friction in daily use by power users.
A cash register that is operated 8 hours a day by one person for 5 days a week for years at a time can (and I argue should!) be designed differently than a check out register that is used by new unexperienced customers for example.
If an action the cashier does 200 times a day takes five seconds longer it makes a difference of 17 minutes a day or 83 minutes a week. That is a workday wasted on nothing in a month.
The same workday could have been spent to train the cashier on a faster cash register that has a tiny bit more powerful user interface.
Five seconds are a tad bit much, but even if you take one second, that number would add up to day in five months of work.
And that is the capitalist efficiency perspective — it also annoys cashiers if they are slow to do the one thing they have to do 200 times a day.
And this is a good thing. Apps don't need to be unique or special, they just need to work and do their jobs effectively.
Overstyling just introduces cognitive load and makes it hard to figure how to get things done, especially when designers feel the need to reinvent basic navigation flows and deviate from the boring established practices.
IMO as an industry we should fight back on the user's behalf against needless styling in the name of branding or design or whatever. Nobody cares. Nobody.
True, but all too often the reason nobody else is has a great answer and you will spend a lot of time figuring it out. That is time you could spend instead on solving a real problem. Sometimes it is worth your time to ask why nobody else isn't because the answer turns out to give you a competitive advantage, but most of the time they have good reason and you will spend a lot of effort finding that reason.
Well company's usually have brand books which lean into this inoffensive sameness to create a uniform personality. We can't expect every employee to be a creative genius, so the result is that everyone is muted.
I think a lot of it is the result of Hotelling's law.
It is a principle rooted in game theory that explains why similar businesses clump together (ex: the McDonald's next to the Burger King). It it exemplified by the ice cream stand problem: two competing ice cream stands on a beach front, similar in every way so that proximity is the only criteria for customers to choose which stand they will go to. Both stands will chose to go towards the center in order to maximize their area of influence. In the end, both stands will be at the center, even though it is not the best for customers, because neither have an incentive to leave the center.
> These prefabricated brand signifiers combined to give us what we now know as the “millennial aesthetic,” a blueprint designed to entice Instagram-obsessed young people.
I would love to point out that Zoomers are out here voting, and some of them are in their 20s. Millennials are not young people anymore.
> A 2021 Road & Track article titled “Why does every new car look like every other new car?” compares the form factors of midsize SUVs from 24 manufacturers. Despite a wide range of price points, they’re more alike than they are different:
This has been true for decades, and unlike the other points I think this can be fairly characterized by industry required risk avoidance. Bringing a car to market is wildly expensive, having one flop because of an edgy design would be, and has been, very consequential. I think as we move into our electric car future we might see more radical designs and more bespoke manufacturers as drivetrain stops being such a big cost and differentiator.
> Website design, especially for SaaS companies, is depressingly mundane
I like to take a stroll through the Japanese web from time to time, it's an alternate universe that looks nothing like the western web.
When working on UI apps we have teams dedicated to making sure every single decision is driven by data. Every little single thing is A/B tested. All of the designers, UX experts, developers opinion is always secondary compared to just good old "increase of clicks".
But then we're just building supermarkets and it makes me angry, well because, supermarkets are ugly.
I'd argue that the "most sellable experience" is almost never the "most beautiful experience". In fact most of my memorable experiences are ones that are NOT mass-marketed. This is also the reason why the "blockbuster hollywood movies" are always worst compared to a more unique indie experience.
This is also why I think the "AI-diffusion" future where new experiences are created off of old massively marketed ones is doomed to fail.
People want diverse unique experiences that have been thought out by experts with decades of experience and with a craftship-level mindset; not things that have been copy/pasted from an AI neural network.
I've never met someone who wanted a diverse, unique app experience. For the most part those are just a pain in the ass created by some overzealous junior designer eager to show off.
Bland and predictable apps are so much nicer. It's not an art project, just a barrier to getting something done... please don't go crazy with it...
Globalization started long ago. With English being spoken everywhere, everything became american. People in obscure countries now celebrate halloween. Well, there are no obscure countries anymore. Once upon a time tourism used to adapt itself to the local culture, now tourists expect the locals to adapt to whatever is considered progressively american. That was the whole point of globalization and what people want. The same soup everywhere. It's not even very new, the tourism industry has been selling since forever packages of "Sea & Sun" with little regard for destination
My favorite take on this is actually from Hyperion, and the discussion(s) about what happens to the various planets once the Hegemony releases its citizens onto them via the WorldWeb.
I read that as a teen, and it was the first time that my eyes opened up to the absolute homogenization places undergo when they try to appeal to "tourists" (or, as is talked about in the book, when they are forced to appeal to tourists just because of the massive, overwhelming numbers of them).
Regurgitating old critiques of terrible, homogeneous design, then holding up as counterexamples two of the most embarrassingly bad designs of the last few years. I suppose this is appropriate for a marketer to write, since Tesla and "Liquid Death" are just marketing departments with other afterthoughts attached.
I don't find this surprising at all and blaming this on big platforms like AirBnN seems to fall a bit short.
It's simple:
The more global communication gets, the more global the styles and patterns become.
Avocado and salmon on sourdough is just good breakfast, no matter where you woke up. And plain concrete rooms have a good aesthetic quality everywhere. Not sure if needs to be advertised on blackboards, written in chalk, though.
>Avocado and salmon on sourdough is just good breakfast, no matter where you woke up
It's only a "good breakfast" for those that have internalized a mostly western-centric aspirational idea of breakfast. Most people in these parts, or say, in Asia or Africa or Latin America, you know where 80% of the global population lives, don't want to have said "good breakfast" 99% of time if they have the choice. We have our own foodstuffs and breakfast preferences...
>plain concrete rooms have a good aesthetic quality everywhere
This optimization of everything eventually leading to everything looking the same is one reason why I hope we don't meet extraterrestrial aliens, although statistically they likely exist, because they probably have similar problems they solve with similar technology, and if there's no special magic, I think many things they'd make would be similar to ours, which is mildly disheartening if you like science fiction as much as I do.
I think there's good reason to be optimistic about diversity at that scale. The environment shapes the direction your easiest path takes. Available material as well as the policies of an alien culture may be enough to send the local minima for optimizations way sideways. Who can say how it plays out on a multi-planet civilization scale, but I think we'd have enough reasons to be happy if we got there :)
Bad jokes aside, unless I missed it, the author forgot one major reason for everything being similar: cost and globalization ie everything is designed and made by respectively the same people and countries. If blandness is the price for people in developing countries being able to afford what we have, it’s a price I’m willing to pay.
don't confuse the "best practices" of late stage capitalism with what life is capable of. The biosphere is, and has been for several hundred million years, incredibly diverse. CF: Amazon rainforest.
Yes, but ultimately physics is physics, and it's hard to beat, say, an electric tea kettle for boiling water quickly, regardless of form factor surrounding the heating element.
> A triple threat of economic globalization, generational transition, and new technology has flattened the aesthetics of our digital and physical lives. What are the origins of these regressive trends?
Given that things used to be less flat, uniform, and globalized, and now they are more, with no signs of the trend stopping, it would be more accurate to call these trends not regressive, but progressive.
Progress doesn't just mean "moving toward the future". It is not "progressive" to remove diversity and agency in favor of a strict sociocultural contract.
This is rather a perfect example of conservatism: refusing to extend beyond comfort zone boundaries because of a strong sense of risk avoidance, for fear of missing out on market opportunity. This conservatism has always existed but has a much broader reach in the era of the global community, and expresses itself in paradoxically new and exciting ways as it froths through the reactors of specific cultures.
I believe "regressive" is used in the sense that the aesthetics are "regressing toward a mean", which is true almost by definition, assuming you believe the postulates in the article.
If discarding the old, traditional, inherited logo, and adopting a new one in line with current trends, with the intent to show a commitment to "diversity & inclusion", is "conservative", then the word can really mean whatever you want it to mean, can't it?
The AirBnB'ing of interior decorating has spilled over into the general housing market, driven too, by too many HGTV shows. It's gotten to the point where if I see a gray floor or countertop, it just screams that this place has no character or charm, that the owners or flippers have no imagination and that I am not the target audience. Shame, because a lot of places have a nice character that just needs to be fixed up. But fixing up takes a custom solution; time, rather than money. Just so much easier to rip out the old and overprint with the factory crap that's in vogue.
Not that other time periods didn't have their fads and fashions, of course. But those fads and fashions are now kind of charming, where they've survived. Will the 2010s and 2020s interior decor induce nostalgia 50 years from now? Who knows.
I'd say even adding money won't decrease the homogenization of modern day building design; instead it usually just results in a higher quantity of the same, ala the McMansion. There is even an entire blog about how these supposedly unique houses really are the same underneath (https://mcmansionhell.com/)
I'm not a fan of blandness, but those counterexamples left me cold. I'm reserving judgement on the Cybertruck until I see how it works out when people are driving it on public roads, but Liquid Death is a product in a sector that barely has reason to exist, differing from its competitors only by its marketing gimmick.
Also, how long until some smoothbrain who thinks it's hilarious to drive around drinking Liquid Death gets pulled over by a cop who thought (or were willing to claim they thought) they saw a beer can, and said smoothbrain ends up getting arrested for the other stuff in their car?
> Playing on the company’s name, he called the phenomenon AirSpace
For what it's worth this is a term from architecture, IIRC coined by Pascoe about 25 years ago, using airports as the jumping off point. Unfortunately most of my books are in storage so I can't confirm the name at the moment, but I know the book is at least a quarter century old.
> Risk mitigation — There’s safety in pursuing ideas already validated by the market.
This is the underlooked factor. It's why movie posters all looked the same for a while, a guy standing in front of a large expanse, often with his back facing you. When faced with ambiguity, it's just easier to copy everyone else rather than take a risk.
The 90s was actually a brief period where cars did look a little different because you had the prime of the minivan explosion and the beginning of the transition to SUVs along with regular passenger cars.
Then in the 2000s SUVs and desperate hunts for aerodynamic (and thus fuel efficiency) performance took over.
They're the same, unless you are a hardcore car nut and can tell models apart from the rake of the B-pillar.
Actually I would argue that the three modern pony cars look more different from each other than the ones in the 60s and 70s did.
Of course there were exceptions, with classic sports, luxury, and utility vehicles standing out from their "normal, consumer" peers, but the same is true of today.
Nobody is going to mistake a Lotus Evora for a Toyota Camry.
But the 1968 Ford Fairlane and Chevy Impala were extremely similar-looking: boxy shape, long chrome stripe running down side, louvered vent below windshield, chrome trim around windshield, four sealed beam headlights, big chrome bumpers, similar windshield angles, wheelbase only 3 inches in difference. The same is true of the other car segments: one compact car looked like another, pickups looked the same, station wagons looked the same.
I think what might be happening is that, yes, all automobiles of the current generation and type look similar-- but so did all cars of the past generations and when making comparisons they're remarking on how different generational "cohorts" look different and mistakenly thinking that meant vehicles within the cohort looked different.
People like me learned how to spot car models, because as the parent says, they looked mostly similar. So parking lot images get shared in places where older folks can test their knowledge.
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention archtitecture, which seems to be at peak levels of "blanding", at least in Europe. New urban developments effectively erase local idiosyncrasies to the point that they're indistinguishable from one another regardless of whether you're in Germany, Britain, Denmark or Spain.
Buildings are permanent in ways apps and restaurant interiors aren't, and I think we're losing something we may not miss until it's gone.
Part of it is buildings are optimized for construction costs and time, which lead to similar buildings (and once the crews know how to build that type of building, it's easier for them to build more).
The main reason left for major country differences (EU vs US) comes down to building materials, mostly. Much of the US is still "stick-built" but lots of EU buildings are brick/concrete.
There are also requirements to function. You will have a door to the street. If it is a store you will have large windows up front to display attract passerby. A house in a car dependent area will dedicate most of the front space to a garage.
You don't have to do any of the above. However it only takes a little thought to realize that you demand the above.
And there are requirements to sell, too, for many people. Commercial buildings have a bit more lee-way (Walmart hardly ever "moves in" to a building and instead knocks it down and rebuilds), but even people who are custom-building a house to their liking have the "what if I have to resell this" in the back of their mind.
I think the biggest sad example of this is how uniform counter heights are in the US, even on multi-million dollar completely custom homes. It's not expensive or hard at all to adjust to fit the user, but it's still sooooo rare.
Just how geographically wide things are might have changed. But if you look at average buildings from same periods they are strikingly similar. We have for long time always mass produced buildings. It is just that in cities we have gotten layers from different decades or centuries.
In America. This is why I love Europe, especially the places which preserve and continue to develop the tradition of beauty, variety, attention to detail, and individual “soul” of each and every place. In Ukraine, for example, every Puzhata Khata location (a cheap Ukrainian homestyle diner chain where I am sitting and eating as I write this comment) looks completely different with its own unique character and furnishings.
Aesthetics in general have completely stalled. The Brooklyn coffee house look, IKEA minimalism or boring Bauhaus architecture have been the default themes for most products/buildings/websites. A mix of impersonal mass production with a touch of Wes Anderson. I hope we can move past it and have newer visual cues that are not permanently stuck in the early 2000's.
One of the major reasons for increasing homogeneity is big data.
This is why websites, apps, and ads look the same. They have been optimized to capture the attention of your lizard brain. These aesthetics have been carefully analyzed and fine-tuned through A/B experimentation to capture the most eyeballs, produce the most clicks, increase the dollars in your shopping cart.
There's a twitter personality calles Lindyman who often covers the same topic from an extended angle, calls it refinement culture. The argument goes that it's not simply aesthetics, stratrgies across domains are all converging into sameness, easiest example being sports. Easiest specific example being baketball becoming a boring game of 3 pointer getting.
I read recently on the Atlantic newsletter that in sports that’s more the Moneyball statistics of playing. Sports have become overoptimized. 3 pointers in basketball. Strikeouts or home runs in baseball.
Maybe it’s too much a focus on math and statistics instead of design in other spaces too? Is that what you mean?
Largely agreed! My view is that 'everything' is being optimized for utility, consistency, and risk managment. This results in unobjectionable but indistinguishable aesthetics, effective but repetitive sports, and shiny but soulless blockbusters.
I agree with you, but I wonder if there will be a point where this no longer works because things become so consistent and repetitive that they no longer hold people's attention? Will we maybe start getting some variety again? Or will they simply land on the optimal amount of change required to keep people hooked and follow that formula ad nauseam...
The author was basically stating that it’s not as much fun to watch anymore. I don’t follow sports too much but I recall he wrote striking out happens 2-3x more often than it used to. Coaches use many more pitchers in a game as well.
Anyway it seems like it got much more boring to watch if most people strike out.
It's the reason every furniture is beige, every company turns into an advertising company and even creative industries like Hollywood can only make superhero/franchise movies.
Risk aversion, margin squeezing and exploiting established consumer bases as much as possible.
Liquid Death strikes me as just an example of the "Gen Z blanding" described by that table in the article (ironic, maximalist, etc.). And that was basically the impression I got the first time I saw it in a store: just another dialectical evolution of cheap, cynical irony that I didn't find surprising at all at the time and I wouldn't be surprised if we see imitators in all kinds of brands in the near future.
If you are Balenciaga what does it bring to have fancy font? It only might make it less readable, makes hassle for production/printing on different types of things.
People want to see brand name and you have already established brand - why would you make it harder to for people to see who you are.
I can understand if you are a startup that wants to catch an eye - but established companies not really.
I think that the current minimal aesthetic really started in the early 00's with Apple's iPod. That design was striking at the time and was the antithesis to 90's grunge aesthetic. I was also a big fan of minimal techno back then and I almost felt like Apple was making nods to that lifestyle. We were certainly using their computers to produce it!
Now minimalism is old hat. I suspect that Gen Z will make some minor statements against it. But the big disruption won't come for another generation.
I recently read Generations by Neil Howe and William Strauss. In the book they make the case that their are 4 archetypes to a generation cycle - Idealist (boomer), Reactive (gen x), Civic (millennial) and Adaptive (gen z). Idealists and Civics are the dominant generations. While Reactive and Adaptive are the less so (one reacts against and the other codifies).
We will soon repeat the cycle sometime in the 2030's. The generation following gen z will be an idealist generation and will disrupt the current "blanding" trends we are living with. Think about the last time this happened. In the 1950s the silent generation (the last cycle's adaptive generation) was coming of age in an extremely conformist era created by the GI Generation (civics). Then the boomers came to age and the 1960s happened.
It depends on what is specifically meant by current minimal aesthetic. At least in architecture, minimalist modernism we can clearly point to Aldof Loo's Ornement and Crime(1908)[1]. It includes gems such as
> The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from utilitarian objects.
> Ornament does not heighten my joy in life or the joy in life of any cultivated person.
and
> Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength.
There was not a history of minimal aesthetic before this era.
I'm not sure how this fits into any generational cycle. I'm not too keen on generational reductionism.
Interesting theory. I’ve read speculation that we may get an austere, conservative (perhaps pious) generation this century, based on cases of declining empire like Rome and Sweden. There are counter-examples as well.
> think that the current minimal aesthetic really started in the early 00's with Apple's iPod. That design was striking at the time and was the antithesis to 90's grunge aesthetic.
Unix users had flat designs on Fluxbox/Blackbox and lot of themes.
this is just the natural evolution of the web/current products i feel like... nobody complains that a cup has a handle and is shaped a certain way. there was a huge push to be "unique" or come up with some clever ui/ux maybe a decade or 2 ago. everything that can be tried has been (medium style editors, page builders, carts, shopping sites, corporate sites, etc. list goes on) and is in the end stages of being "refined" now. i think that time is near over now.
people just want their information or to use their app and be done with it. i'm fine w/ all my apps having similar layout and design if it helps me get shit done. maybe a new paradigm or industry will open that creativity once again.
I prefer to have all of my consumables delivered via periodic automated Amazon Prime. This, combined with a small maintenance staff, and several tubes, frees me to work almost 24-7. I never leave my Aeron Task Chair.
Even the tourist trinkets look the same, they're all made in China nowadays with some stamped flags and such, luckily I'm not buying much stuff these days.
Am I the only one bewildered by the fact the author mentions AirBnb as the start of the modern cloned, esterile, all-white interior design and not IKEA?
oh boy, worst offender is material design. it looked horrible when it came out and still looks horrible years after. and so many examples of it out in the wild :(
If I go to supermarket I don't want "shopping experience" - I want to buy bread and eggs - set your shop in a way where I can do it quickly and I will be coming back.
There are of course places/events where it should be an experience, like if I go to fancy restaurant I want "fancy dinner experience". When I am on the road and have to just eat something McDonalds does the job 10 mins and I am out even if it is not best choice food wise.
So setting up your page if it is webshop or streaming service - I don't go there to wonder how cool web design might be - I go there to buy stuff or start video.