The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel like Apple is stagnating.

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

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

Snow Leopard and iOS6 were their OS' peak.

I don't really care about "fun", but I just can't find the words to explain how happy I am that there's a chance we might put all this flat madness behind us. I'm looking forward to:

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

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

Mom: Which one's the edit button?

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

Mom: Alex they all look like lines in a rectangle

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

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

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

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