that is funny, just the other day i was thinking about how i wished twitter, in particular, felt more 'fun', and started making a stylesheet to try and make it feel more 2006-ish or something lol https://i.jollo.org/xoYwhYpb.png
The Death of Personality (2017)
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Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#12that is funny, just the other day i was thinking about how i wished twitter, in particular, felt more 'fun', and started making a stylesheet to try and make it feel more 2006-ish or something lol https://i.jollo.org/xoYwhYpb.png
Would unironically use twitter if it looked like that, ngl. looking rad! :)
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#13As a counter, I think what isn’t pointed out here is that minimalistic design is important to increase engagement. Intricate, pretty, interesting things are also exhausting after a while. Minimal designs do a good job at allowing users to compartmentalize and ignore without too much difficulty.
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#14Au contraire: HN’s interface. I know no one who is displeased with the simplicity of design except designers themselves*. Just like premature optimization for engineers, it feels like designers are building for themselves rather than their customer. In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. -Hendry Wadsworth
There's a difference between "simplicity" and "simplicity at the user's expense." Outside of HN, major trends in design include: Making all your phone's icons look the same, making it harder to quickly find what you're looking for. Low-contrast gray text on white backgrounds, which are nightmarish if your eyesight isn't good. We can keep going here.
More to the point, HN achieves simplity without going to an extreme where the user experience is negatively affected.
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#15Related:
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#16Au contraire: HN’s interface. I know no one who is displeased with the simplicity of design except designers themselves*. Just like premature optimization for engineers, it feels like designers are building for themselves rather than their customer. In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. -Hendry Wadsworth
I was a newspaper layout designer in a previous life. The only complaint I have about HN is the line length on large-ish screens.
In my newspaper days we stuck to around 60 characters as an optimal line length for readability. I've seen up to 80, but even that seems to be pushing it. Once you stretch out the lines so much it's hard to track back and forth from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line.
I'm reading the parent, top-level comment on a Macbook Air with a 13 inch screen and the first line is a whopping 194 characters long. Reading anything of length on this screen is decidedly uncomfortable when browsing HN.
I agree that simplicity is a noble and useful goal, but when it comes at the expense of usability it's hard to swallow.
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#17Never underestimate the wants of clients. We are all in this chaotic ride together.
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#18As a counter, I think what isn’t pointed out here is that minimalistic design is important to increase engagement. Intricate, pretty, interesting things are also exhausting after a while. Minimal designs do a good job at allowing users to compartmentalize and ignore without too much difficulty.
More likely, it's just aesthetic trends. Styles crash in, spread widely, become stale, and get replaced. Often those replacements call back to prior styles while exploring new dimensions to them.
To think that today's style finally achieved some objective progress about engagement and exhaustion is just post hoc speculation.
Minimal design is itself getting exhausting, and there are a number of styles that are coming in to challenge it, including intentionally garish designs that nostalgically call back to the Myspace/Geocities aesthetic that many young designers are fascinated by.
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#19Google has recently screwed this up too with Material You where every single icon looks basically the same. App icons should be distinct. They are there for you to recognize the app! Monochrome and uniform shape does not help with this.
Perhaps this is deliberate? The user "discovers" a new Google app by accidentally clicking on it when they really wanted Gmail or Maps?
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#20When UX design is about how to decrease usability least with the new design instead of increasing usability, something has seriously gone wrong.