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The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism

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Re: The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism

#21

Post by unsupp0rted »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #7
mortenjorck wrote: post #2

"Neumorphism" came and went because it was a clumsily unnecessary neologism tacked onto a loosely-defined trend. Adding more shading and depth cues to user interfaces is a broader trend that has continued since the popular repudiation of those tools in the early-mid 2010s, but the attempt to package this up and shoehorn it into a neat label alongside "skeuomorphic" and "flat design" was never a particularly useful ex…

Oh god... you reminded me how much I miss skeuomorphism. Every time you open the app, you can enjoy that little piece of art. The artist rendering of the digital model of the object in question. Now all OS GUIs feels completely the same. As if there is a War on Aesthetics and art treated as an infection to get removed.

I don't want any art in my phone. My wallpaper and lock screen are both black for legiblility.

I use my phone exclusively as a tool (a tool for communication, for social media, for learning, etc). It's aesthetically and functionally designed very well and that's all the art I need from it.

I only want art when I want art.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism

#22

Post by mortenjorck »

skohan wrote: post #10
sebastianconcpt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh god... you reminded me how much I miss skeuomorphism. Every time you open the app, you can enjoy that little piece of art. The artist rendering of the digital model of the object in question. Now all OS GUIs feels completely the same. As if there is a War on Aesthetics and art treated as an infection to get removed.

I understand why trends have moved away from skeuomorphism. It's inefficient to have image assets for every inch of the screen, and it adds more visual noise to parse for the user. Also it was easier to deliver these types of designs in high quality when there was exactly one screen size/aspect ratio to support. At the same time, I was making apps during the skeuomorphic period, and it was a lot of fun! We used to po…

Somewhere there is a gag UI mockup I made at the peak of the Scott Forstall rich-Corinthian-leather period of what I imagined a future Safari UI might look like, in which the app's name was taken literally and given a Jeep-like makeover.

That may have been a joke, but there is a certain playfulness that I think the industry is still trying to find again in the modernist period that came as a reaction to past excesses.

Edit: Found the mockup: https://imgur.com/twSdV

Re: The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism

#23

Post by dang »

neinnonyet wrote: post #11
dang wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for offtopicness, but could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. I don't want to ban you, because your comments (with this account) are good. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. O…

We cant ignore the consequences of linking our viewing and posting habits to an identity, either. Some people don't appreciate being profiled. Simply picking a username that is not your real name does not fully address that.

Yes—there are tradeoffs. But HN would be a different place if it were just a collection of comments without usernames. That's not the kind of site this is, so posting here involves making some of those tradeoffs.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism

#24

Post by skohan »

sprash wrote: post #14
skohan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why trends have moved away from skeuomorphism. It's inefficient to have image assets for every inch of the screen, and it adds more visual noise to parse for the user. Also it was easier to deliver these types of designs in high quality when there was exactly one screen size/aspect ratio to support. At the same time, I was making apps during the skeuomorphic period, and it was a lot of fun! We used to po…

> It's inefficient to have image assets for every inch of the screen With modern GPUs pushing bitmaps is actually far more efficient than drawing shapes. > it adds more visual noise to parse for the user On the contrary. It gives better visual cues on where to find what you need. Also noise is actually good in some cases. I have a blue noise background for my terminals which tremendously helps with eyestrain.

> With modern GPUs pushing bitmaps is actually far more efficient than drawing shapes.

No I mean it's inefficient from a product development standpoint. With a flat design, you can make a design system which will scale very easily to multiple screen sizes and aspect ratios. If you have to texture everything there is much more you have to account for.

> I have a blue noise background for my terminals which tremendously helps with eyestrain.

Yeah I mean blue noise is one thing, it's explicitly non-information, but I think in general trying to parse text on top of a pattern is harder than without.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism

#25

Post by skohan »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #20
skohan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why trends have moved away from skeuomorphism. It's inefficient to have image assets for every inch of the screen, and it adds more visual noise to parse for the user. Also it was easier to deliver these types of designs in high quality when there was exactly one screen size/aspect ratio to support. At the same time, I was making apps during the skeuomorphic period, and it was a lot of fun! We used to po…

Art is not noise. It's the opposite. Art is a concrete rendering of a symbol with the opposite of noise: meaning. The compulsion to send a more artistic asset to the category of noise is the replication of the anti-aesthetics culture in GUIs current designs. As if it would not be alternatives, like appreciation of it in lighter forms, which, Neuomorphism feels like a reasonable attempt at that.

Most apps are just products which serve a function, not art.

Like they used to put a lot of extra ornamentation on buildings during the baroque period, but eventually people mostly stopped doing it because the building functions just the same without it, and it's harder to add it.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism

#26

Post by rubito »

dchuk wrote: post #15

It never rose. It was just silly design concepts on Dribbble, no real/popular apps actually adopted it. It's a terrible design system, it looks like you took a perfectly good interface, draped a table cloth over it, and pushed it upwards so you have this weird silhouette feature going on.

It’s used in the Ford EV line: https://youtu.be/agpDIZmGRTw

Re: The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism

#27

Post by jibbers »

mortenjorck wrote: post #22
skohan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why trends have moved away from skeuomorphism. It's inefficient to have image assets for every inch of the screen, and it adds more visual noise to parse for the user. Also it was easier to deliver these types of designs in high quality when there was exactly one screen size/aspect ratio to support. At the same time, I was making apps during the skeuomorphic period, and it was a lot of fun! We used to po…

Somewhere there is a gag UI mockup I made at the peak of the Scott Forstall rich-Corinthian-leather period of what I imagined a future Safari UI might look like, in which the app's name was taken literally and given a Jeep-like makeover. That may have been a joke, but there is a certain playfulness that I think the industry is still trying to find again in the modernist period that came as a reaction to past excesses…

That is incredible! It just needs a rear view mirror with the last page you visited in it ;)

Re: The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism

#28

Post by woojoo666 »

mortenjorck wrote: post #2

"Neumorphism" came and went because it was a clumsily unnecessary neologism tacked onto a loosely-defined trend. Adding more shading and depth cues to user interfaces is a broader trend that has continued since the popular repudiation of those tools in the early-mid 2010s, but the attempt to package this up and shoehorn it into a neat label alongside "skeuomorphic" and "flat design" was never a particularly useful ex…

Fyi your article looks pretty bad on mobile. Starts zoomed in, body font is tiny, zero margins on the side, paragraph headings are too similar to body text, image captions are indistinguishable from body text. I usually don't comment about these things but in this case the article and website are specifically about UI/UX

Re: The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism

#29

Post by danhau »

skohan wrote: post #10
sebastianconcpt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh god... you reminded me how much I miss skeuomorphism. Every time you open the app, you can enjoy that little piece of art. The artist rendering of the digital model of the object in question. Now all OS GUIs feels completely the same. As if there is a War on Aesthetics and art treated as an infection to get removed.

I understand why trends have moved away from skeuomorphism. It's inefficient to have image assets for every inch of the screen, and it adds more visual noise to parse for the user. Also it was easier to deliver these types of designs in high quality when there was exactly one screen size/aspect ratio to support. At the same time, I was making apps during the skeuomorphic period, and it was a lot of fun! We used to po…

> and it adds more visual noise to parse for the user.

I disagree. Skeumorphic UIs always were much easier to parse for me than flat design. Maybe I was just subjected to terrible implementations of it, but everything in flat design started to melt into itself after a while of staring at it. I had a hard time distinguishing between purely visual things and interactive widgets.

I‘m speaking in past tense because things have improved. Current flat (inspired) design is easier for me than X years ago.

Meanwhile with skeumorphism, I immediately groked what was what because things had correlations with items in real life. But I think the biggest helper was skeumorphic having naturally more visual depth, which helps me tremendously.

But maybe that‘s just me. I also have a hard time watching Kurzgesagt videos (although they‘re also getting a bit easier for me). Their flat style is so hard on my eyes. Maybe I‘m just broken.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism

#30

Post by sebastianconcpt »

skohan wrote: post #25
sebastianconcpt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Art is not noise. It's the opposite. Art is a concrete rendering of a symbol with the opposite of noise: meaning. The compulsion to send a more artistic asset to the category of noise is the replication of the anti-aesthetics culture in GUIs current designs. As if it would not be alternatives, like appreciation of it in lighter forms, which, Neuomorphism feels like a reasonable attempt at that.

Most apps are just products which serve a function, not art. Like they used to put a lot of extra ornamentation on buildings during the baroque period, but eventually people mostly stopped doing it because the building functions just the same without it, and it's harder to add it.

Yes, we agree there is a cost motivator.

All games are apps. All games are expressions of art.

The price of removing all possibility of art in software, leads to an expression of some kind of software brutalism and UIs that only a niche of temperaments would be fine to work with (and feel from suckish to a torture for the rest).

Have you noticed that we could be talkning about almost the same but factor out the subject of the discussion and make it music?

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