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Claymorphism: Will it stick around?

smashingmagazine.com

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Re: Claymorphism: Will it stick around?

#11
post #3

"Flat design and its more popular successor, Material design, have been dominating the web UI for quite some time, featuring a minimalistic aesthetic that eliminates visual clutter and favors user experience." Yeah. Unfortunately not everyone is masochistic enough to enjoy the Flat or Material design.

Google's Material Design is such a hostile system. "lets create action buttons well away from the action" "modal dialogues _must_ take over as much area as possible, regardless of triviality" For all the noise about research lead UX, it doesn't seem that people actually performed research on users, only other UX people.

The problem with UX is every single UX designer thinks they intuitively know what is best for users when studies show that to be completely false. So Google are right to listen to research instead. No UX design can please everyone.

Re: Claymorphism: Will it stick around?

#12
post #9

Yes these claymorphic UIs appear childish, but the buttons are large enough to not present a choking hazard.

I don't like it much either, aesthetically, but you can kind of see where you can expect a click to trigger an action, so it has that going for it.

Re: Claymorphism: Will it stick around?

#14
Neumorphism is just a style, not a complete design philosophy like skeumorphism, or the rejection of skeumorphism. It wouldn't even be compared to the two if its inventor didn't give it a clever name. It does look nice though, when not overdone. But Claymorphism? Sorry but it looks like the kind of buttons I made with the emboss effect in Paint Shop Pro in the 90s :-D. But it does give me nostalgia.

I think there is a lot of knowledge of how to make these effects that gets lost and rediscovered periodically. Both web designers and desktop theme designers had a lot of tricks. For example, you can make something look concave or convex with a subtle gradient (like in neumorphism). Or, you can make a button look more realistic with a 1px grey shadow around, grounding it to the background (like buildings in a RTS game might have. Or, you can use a gradient with a step in the middle to simulate glossyness and get an "aqua" style. It might be a fun and useful project to collect this kind of knowledge.

Re: Claymorphism: Will it stick around?

#15
> On Apple’s iPhone OS 1, the YouTube app icon is a television instead of the iconic logo we know today!

Because that logo didn't exist yet! YouTube didn't start using their modern logo until 2017 -- before then, they were using a wordmark logo which wouldn't have made for a good icon.

Re: Claymorphism: Will it stick around?

#18
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's Material Design is such a hostile system. "lets create action buttons well away from the action" "modal dialogues _must_ take over as much area as possible, regardless of triviality" For all the noise about research lead UX, it doesn't seem that people actually performed research on users, only other UX people.

The problem with UX is every single UX designer thinks they intuitively know what is best for users when studies show that to be completely false. So Google are right to listen to research instead. No UX design can please everyone.

Google also has some of the worst UX I have ever used. The only good one and the last one was google search homepage.

Re: Claymorphism: Will it stick around?

#20
Is this really a trend? I'm getting very strong neumorphism vibes from it: A contrived trend that never really worked, looked outdated from the start, and never got main stream.

The real vs Dribbble ratio of the examples in this post points in the same direction.

I do think the 3d graphics are a trend, which fair enough have often a sort of clayish aesthetic, but I am very skeptical that will become a popular all encompassing UI style.

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