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The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

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Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#111

Post by on_and_off »

alxlaz wrote: post #10

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? M…

> Not hovering everything for five minutes until I can figure out what I can click

I really like the way material addresses this : any clickable element should use the primary color of your app. This way, no guesswork. Button, switches, icons, links, they all use the same action color so if something uses it, you know it has to be clickable.

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#112

Post by majewsky »

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #104
weinzierl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He lives in Germany in the 1000 year old castle he bought in 1999 from the money he made from his ownership in the companies HSC, MetaTools and MetaCreations. The castle was not in the best state back then and was restored by Kai. Here is an aerial photo of the castle from 2009[1]. I lies on the Middle Rhine, a very beautiful area. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Burg_Rhe...

oh man, I didn't even know it was possible to just buy a castle. That's crazy cool

They can be bought and sold like any other realty. Some are owned by the state (esp. those used as public museums) and not up for sale, though.

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#113

Post by the_other »

alxlaz wrote: post #102
asadkn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem isn't necessarily flat vs skeuomorphism - it's the representations that are not really representative to everyone. Try "Click that icon with the floppy disk to save." with a new user.

> it's the representations that are not really representative to everyone. That's true of virtually every graphical representation in a computer application. Save icon? How about folders ? Where I'm from, folders (the physical item) never took off. Even today, we use a sort of slimmed-down binder for small collections of documents. For millions of people, myself included, the folders in Windows 95 and Windows 98 were…

Just my anecdote...

The folder metaphor helped me grasp what was going on. The first computers I spent significant time with were BBCs. They had two filesystems: DFS and ADFS (I think). The Advanced Disk Filing System had folders, but all the documentation I found called them "files". Files could point to files and make a tree of files. 11 year old me just gave up on this. Why would you want a tree of files? Why should a file link to a file...? Nonsense.

Folders (in Gem and Windows) made MUCH more sense. Aaah... it's for organising ideas. Bingo!

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#114

Post by conradfr »

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #104
weinzierl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He lives in Germany in the 1000 year old castle he bought in 1999 from the money he made from his ownership in the companies HSC, MetaTools and MetaCreations. The castle was not in the best state back then and was restored by Kai. Here is an aerial photo of the castle from 2009[1]. I lies on the Middle Rhine, a very beautiful area. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Burg_Rhe...

oh man, I didn't even know it was possible to just buy a castle. That's crazy cool

They cost a lot of time and money to maintain, that's why you can buy a lot of them in Europe, in various state of damage.

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#115

Post by sirn »

xoa wrote: post #65
mensetmanusman wrote: post #3

I wonder if Apple will ever let people install app icon libraries to change the appearance of default apps. That would be fun (at least I remember having fun as a kid doing that on Windows 95).

AFAIK (haven't kicked the wheels on macOS 11 beta yet) you can still manually change all the default icons? I do anyway, I always hated Apple's new ones and found a perfect set I liked instead. All default system icons are still just icns bundles at /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources And could always just be swapped with whatever you want. With the advent of SIP it's now somewhat more in…

Not sure if it's possible for default apps (I don't have a Mac right now), but can't you just open a Get Item dialog, drag & drop an alternative icon onto the icon displayed in the dialog to replace it? (& click the icon, press delete to restore)

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#116

Post by majewsky »

jrockway wrote: post #30
caiobegotti wrote: post #7

In case HN is bringing it down (as it seems to be the case now): https://web.archive.org/web/20200705130437/https://applypixe...

What's weird is that it fails at SSL protocol negotiation; Chrome says it can't agree on a SSL version or cipher. This is weird because the cert is issued by CloudFlare, who probably shouldn't fail TLS negotiation just because the backend is unresponsive. Very strange.

On Firefox, I get SEC_ERROR_OCSP_UNAUTHORIZED_REQUEST, so there may be a problem with CloudFlare's OCSP server (?!?). But this is because I manually set security.ocsp.require = true in about:config. When I reset that to false, the page opens fine.

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#117

Post by uniqueid »

asadkn wrote: post #69
alxlaz wrote: post #10

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? M…

The real problem isn't necessarily flat vs skeuomorphism - it's the representations that are not really representative to everyone. Try "Click that icon with the floppy disk to save." with a new user.

The "flat design" we've had for the past decade really is flat design, but the dubbing of what preceded it as "skeuomorphism" was a misnomer, in most cases.

In theory, an old "save" icon would look like a floppy disk (or perhaps a picture of a red tape-recorder "button") whereas a modern, flat "save" icon would be the word "SAVE".

In practice, if a button is labelled "SAVE", but in beautifully shaded and embossed typography, it too is "skeuomorphic", while some ugly disk-drive symbol, in the flat style of highway sign, is acceptably "flat".

A decade ago, most popular software did not abuse skeuomorphism. It was primarily great masses of iPhone crap apps, and four or five, widely talked-about, Scott Forstall iOS projects.

Like others in this thread are saying, I don't care much whether the software I use is "fun", but I do want it to be beautiful and intuitive. "Flat design" has been bad in that regard, and primarily as a reaction to a minority of apps looked like toasters or radios.

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#118

Post by majewsky »

sandGorgon wrote: post #64

here's a very interesting take here - about art deco being the design for the next few years https://vanschneider.com/art-deco-will-be-the-visual-languag... However, I also believe that the Bauhaus way of using flat designs with interesting shapes and motion will be an interesting path forward

I don't have any experience in art history or design, but judging by the photos in your article, you seem to be conjecturing that in 5-10 years, everything is going to look like a Wes Anderson film. :)

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#119

Post by MintelIE »

Busy work for people who really shouldn't be in tech is what UI design has become.

We had great UI, then tech branched out and we need to redo every UI continuously so the marketing people (who mostly also don't belong in tech) can boast of new and improved this and that. It's all so tiresome.

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#120

Post by majewsky »

EGreg wrote: post #77

Finally Apple has come to its senses! This flatness was like the touchbar. People forget but the reason this minimalist design travesty happened was political: Steve Jobs was no longer around, he had fired Scott Forstall because of the bungled Maps fiasco, and he promoted Jony Ive, the hardware minimalist who wanted to Bauhaus all the things. This is what I wrote in 2016, if Steve Jobs still ran Apple: https://magars…

> This is what I wrote in 2016, if Steve Jobs still ran Apple: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234

You may want to install a spam filter on that comment section, or just disable it.

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