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Material Design Guidelines for Dark Mode

material.io

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Re: Material Design Guidelines for Dark Mode

#71

Post by afiori »

reaperducer wrote: post #10
spectramax wrote: post #2

I have a deep rooted issue with design and designers. In 90’s, skeuomorphic trend was picking up steam reaching a climax in mid-2000’s. Web 2.0 design elements were springing up, taking advantage of css; while UI elements sought transparency and blur (Windows Vista). That trend passed and then we had the whole Material design boom in 2012-2015, the entire web was sabotaged by Bootstrap. Color themes and palettes were…

I'm just not a fan of Material. I've tried to like it, but it just won't stick. I know a lot of people think Material=Professional. But I think Material looks more like a small business using a drag-and-drop home page builder. Yes, that goes for the Android interface, too. I never understood the hatred for skeuomorphism. It's intuitive. It's pretty. It's colorful. It's artistic. A bunch of stacked squares isn't any o…

IMO, when well done, Material design looks like skeuomorphism for movement.

That is probably correlated with my taste for minimalist/stylized animation/graphics.

Arguably often it appears just low effort, empty and forgettable.

Re: Material Design Guidelines for Dark Mode

#72

Post by madeofpalk »

azdacha wrote: post #63
madeofpalk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Designers fundamentally do not understand that software is a tool that people use to get things done. I find this point of view - that designers are inferior to developers - to be incredibly condescending and yet very typical of HN. I'm a developer, and I would hate to work with you or someone who holds this view point. You seem like poison in a development team. Regardless of whether you meant or not, that's what…

Full stack dev : he didn't say they are inferior but that in his point of views most designers don't understand their design should conceived as a tool. Now that's discussable as it changes from project to project. A promotional website shouldn't be forcefully seen as a tool but cool be seen as a augmented poster. Now I understand his point of view when he says that designer use too much icons language, without any t…

No, lets be clear here. OP said that Designers fundamentally do not understand their job, how OP "hates UIs and [..] UI designers" and how much they know better.

What OP is talking about is how sometimes there is bad design, in exactly the same way there is bad code, and using that to extrapolate out to an entire discipline. Imagine seeing someone's shitty very first Visual Basic project and just declaring that all developers fundamentally don't understand their jobs.

Re: Material Design Guidelines for Dark Mode

#73

Post by pjc50 »

hbosch wrote: post #56
spectramax wrote: post #2

I have a deep rooted issue with design and designers. In 90’s, skeuomorphic trend was picking up steam reaching a climax in mid-2000’s. Web 2.0 design elements were springing up, taking advantage of css; while UI elements sought transparency and blur (Windows Vista). That trend passed and then we had the whole Material design boom in 2012-2015, the entire web was sabotaged by Bootstrap. Color themes and palettes were…

I have a deep rooted issue with development and developers. In 90’s, ActionScript trend was picking up steam reaching a climax in mid-2000’s. Flash websites were springing up, taking advantage of animations and sound; while UI elements sought transparency and blur (Windows Vista). That trend passed and then we had the whole ES6 boom in 2012-2015, the entire web was sabotaged by JavaScript frameworks. Frontend librari…

I've seen unironic versions of your parody argument posted right here, especially when someone posts an Electron app.

Re: Material Design Guidelines for Dark Mode

#74

Post by sonnyblarney »

titzer wrote: post #49
davidivadavid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditional graphic design cannot be "solved" and will always be ruled by more or less cyclical trends because graphic design is used (among other things) as a differentiating branding element for marketing and communication. And you can't differentiate a product when everyone has the same branding. Someone starts standing out. People start copying them. And then a new trend emerges, ad infinitum. Industrial design i…

I totally agree with you. Unfortunately this triggers my rant mode: When branding hits hammers, I think I might quit the human race. Designers fundamentally do not understand that software is a tool that people use to get things done. Constant reorganization and redesign for trends literally robs people of their skills in learning to use software to accomplish their goals. I've been using computers since the early 90…

"Designers fundamentally do not understand that software is a tool that people use to get things done. "

They understand.

Also 'UI design' and 'design' are separate disciplines, often conflated into the same thing.

'UI designers' 100% understand the nature of 'usability' it's the core of their job - they provide for the actual experience that users will encounter, and it's very hard.

Having done quite a lot of UI design and software, I think the former might be hard in many cases - there are just so many intangibles, and everything cross-cuts making coherency often difficult, moreover 'there are no perfect answers'.

Consider the Google home page, and how many features actually exist in Google search that the vast majority of people are not aware of. The 'google search bar' is the 'most used UI in the world' and my gosh do they have to worry about how to extend that to the range of 'barely literate' people, to regular users, to power-searchers.

Consider the other 'most popular UI': Windows. The Windows 10 release was a fiasco, consider that the richest company in the world struggled to map to a new UI paradigm for a variety of reasons.

At least with software we tend to derive an objective, and we 'solve the problem'. We can say 'it's done' (to a certain degree) and even test for completeness.

Re: Material Design Guidelines for Dark Mode

#75

Post by owenwil »

gnicholas wrote: post #31

The author suggests using dark gray instead of black, but then also says that when pixels are completely deactivated on OLED, it saves energy. These seem to be contradictory pieces of advice. What am I missing?

In the accessibility section[1] they discuss the problem of using true black: OLED Smudge. If you turn off OLED pixels and the display suddenly needs to turn them back on, they usually are too slow to do so, and cause a visual artefact that appears to the user as smudging up the screen—which can feel like the display itself is broken. This occurs on most OLED displays, including high end ones in devices like iPhone XS and Pixel 3, and is largely why true black interfaces should not be used.

> "On OLED screens, turning pixels on and off can cause a delay when the screen is scrolled, making the pixels blur."

[1] https://material.io/design/color/dark-theme.html#properties

Re: Material Design Guidelines for Dark Mode

#76

Post by sonnyblarney »

titzer wrote: post #49
davidivadavid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditional graphic design cannot be "solved" and will always be ruled by more or less cyclical trends because graphic design is used (among other things) as a differentiating branding element for marketing and communication. And you can't differentiate a product when everyone has the same branding. Someone starts standing out. People start copying them. And then a new trend emerges, ad infinitum. Industrial design i…

I totally agree with you. Unfortunately this triggers my rant mode: When branding hits hammers, I think I might quit the human race. Designers fundamentally do not understand that software is a tool that people use to get things done. Constant reorganization and redesign for trends literally robs people of their skills in learning to use software to accomplish their goals. I've been using computers since the early 90…

"When branding hits hammers"

Hammers were probably some of the very first things 'branded'.

You want a quality, reliable, robust tool, and surely blacksmiths and makers developed their own reputations for quality among other things.

Branding can be some flakey mumbo jumbo, but it doesn't have to be, in fact in shouldn't be. The three rules of branding are 'authenticity, simplicity and consistency' - and the better brands are good at '1' i.e. 'authenticity', meaning the brand truly reflects the nature of the product or organization.

Re: Material Design Guidelines for Dark Mode

#77

Post by TeMPOraL »

pjc50 wrote: post #73
hbosch wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a deep rooted issue with development and developers. In 90’s, ActionScript trend was picking up steam reaching a climax in mid-2000’s. Flash websites were springing up, taking advantage of animations and sound; while UI elements sought transparency and blur (Windows Vista). That trend passed and then we had the whole ES6 boom in 2012-2015, the entire web was sabotaged by JavaScript frameworks. Frontend librari…

I've seen unironic versions of your parody argument posted right here, especially when someone posts an Electron app.

Well, s/BASIC/Lisp/ in that comment, and the critique is spot-on.

Re: Material Design Guidelines for Dark Mode

#78

Post by andrewingram »

turbinerneiter wrote: post #37
sonnyblarney wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is the conflation of the form and functional aspects of design. The 'Stripe gradient' on their home page, and a few other things are purely aesthetic, and frankly extraneous to the more functional aspects. Most of the 'guidelines' from Material were reasonably pragmatic, although very picky, beyond what is necessary in all but the most comprehensive apps with big budgets. There's nothing wrong with some aes…

I think this is a great point. Design has two layers. The first one is based on science. Ergonomics (i.e. edge of the screen is fast to reach with a mouse, color contrast, size of fonts, ...). The second layer is style. In the given constraint of color contrast, you use _these_ colors, ... The minimalist style often acts like it is on the first layer, but it is just style on top of ergonomics. It is a good design sys…

In the case of Stripe, a lot of their value hinges on being able to convince both developers and designers that the experience they offer is worth the slightly higher transaction fees. Their design aesthetic (and documentation) communicates this very effectively (in my opinion).

Re: Material Design Guidelines for Dark Mode

#79

Post by TeMPOraL »

madeofpalk wrote: post #59
titzer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree with you. Unfortunately this triggers my rant mode: When branding hits hammers, I think I might quit the human race. Designers fundamentally do not understand that software is a tool that people use to get things done. Constant reorganization and redesign for trends literally robs people of their skills in learning to use software to accomplish their goals. I've been using computers since the early 90…

> Designers fundamentally do not understand that software is a tool that people use to get things done. I find this point of view - that designers are inferior to developers - to be incredibly condescending and yet very typical of HN. I'm a developer, and I would hate to work with you or someone who holds this view point. You seem like poison in a development team. Regardless of whether you meant or not, that's what…

> I find this point of view - that designers are inferior to developers - to be incredibly condescending and yet very typical of HN. I'm a developer, and I would hate to work with you or someone who holds this view point. You seem like poison in a development team.

It's not about skills, it's about goals.

There are roughly two main conflicting goals when building a product. One, make a product that delivers value to users. Two, make money off that product. In a perfect world, these two would be maximized simultaneously - leading to fair exchange of value between the customer and the provider. In the real world, people sacrifice the first in order to get more of the second.

UI/UX design as it is today is almost entirely about sacrificing utility to boost sales. All the trends parent commenters are complaining about exist to convince users to spend money by means other than delivering a useful product to them - be it by differentiation from others, by looking like popular players, by reducing functionality to make it look simpler when purchasing decision is made. Addiction-inducing design trends like timelines and notifications and loot boxes are a part of this too.

This is not failure of intelligence of individuals, this is a moral failure of the industry. And being on receiving end, as a software user, it's fucking annoying. So is being upstream from it, as a software developer doing their best to deliver value to user, only to see it shat upon because the organization adopts user-hostile design trends.

Re: Material Design Guidelines for Dark Mode

#80

Post by TeMPOraL »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #74
titzer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree with you. Unfortunately this triggers my rant mode: When branding hits hammers, I think I might quit the human race. Designers fundamentally do not understand that software is a tool that people use to get things done. Constant reorganization and redesign for trends literally robs people of their skills in learning to use software to accomplish their goals. I've been using computers since the early 90…

"Designers fundamentally do not understand that software is a tool that people use to get things done. " They understand. Also 'UI design' and 'design' are separate disciplines, often conflated into the same thing. 'UI designers' 100% understand the nature of 'usability' it's the core of their job - they provide for the actual experience that users will encounter, and it's very hard. Having done quite a lot of UI des…

> how many features actually exist in Google search that the vast majority of people are not aware of

And why they're not aware of them? Google does an excellent job of hiding features sought by users (and then sunsetting them when they're not used; I wonder why they're not used). The design there does not serve the users' needs.

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