Don't worry, we're just in the middle of the white part on the fashion barberpole.
Nice. Getting back to the blood-soaked bandages part any day now.
The Death of Personality (2017)
51–60 of 70 posts
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#52that 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! :)
Rad is definitely the word.
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'…
This is something that has consistently bothered me about the web for most of my life. Why sites like Wikipedia (and many blogs) don't limit line length by default is beyond me. I usually just end up zooming in and/or limiting the width of my browser window.
Because if you want to narrow a wide window, you can just resize the browser.
But if I want to widen a fixed-with design, I can't.
So yeah, I'm with Wikipedia.
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#54My Biggest issue when reading a lot of sites is that i dont like seeing the content in the middle. and the screen not being entirely used. Most of the time when im browsing i will check some stuff on hackernews on emacs. but only because i want to see something real quick for a break. i also find i have to style a lot of sites because they simply just either dont fit what i want or like certain fonts they use like O and 0 is not obvious enough. and i dont want to make a mistake on the content.
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#55Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#56That is just design evolution not 'lack of personality'.
I prefer 'modern' except for the fact that there's a lack of borders and groupings, and designers try to get too smart.
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#57I just wrote about this in my blog. I'm lazy so I'll copypaste it here.
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Linguists already understood a long, long time ago that redundancy is not a bug, it's a feature; it's what allows you to decode a message even if you don't get it fully.
I feel like interface designers should’ve understood the same already. Sleep-deprived, with poor sight, not tech-savvy enough to get it right, using a non-native language because the native one is not supported, interacting with the program while taking care of a kid, there are a thousand (no, a million) ways that users can miss small tidbits of info conveyed by the design, so that redundancy is essential.
Yet they didn’t. On the opposite, the current design trends boil down to redundant → removable → should be removed. Also known as “minimalism”.
You end with icons that look the same, not quite sure if something is clickable or not, those ugly switches that assume (why is there always some assumer behind poor decisions?) that you're aware of the "right = on, left = off" (or that on/off makes sense in that context), so goes on.
And it’s kind of funny. If you actually point this out, plenty designers (or other laymen, like me, except that they agree with the design decisions being pointed out) will be quick to spit the same fallacy: “it’s new so it’s better, as an assumer I assume that you live in the past”… yeah, nah.
This may or may not be related to the fact that I still use MATE, instead of GNOME 3 or similar.
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[Non-copypasted] Someone mentioned HN’s interface. It's the exception that proves the rule because, when you actually analyse it, it has all tidbits of redundancy here and there; such as the "next", "upvote", "collapse" and "reply" buttons appearing for all comments. A minimalist designer would've removed them all, and made the content of the comments clickable.
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#58Google 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.
Most annoying is that the clickable elements are not identified visually. This does have an upside. Sort of. People are more accepting of dark patterns, as when you have to mouse over the ad before the "x" to make it go away appears. In a different place each time, for the worst cases.
‘DOWNLOAD NOW’ hahahahaha
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#59As 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…
I hate to be the guy bringing up crypto, but case in point: look at the design trends happening there. Curve finance was cool partly because it looks like Windows 3.1
Re: The Death of Personality (2017)
#60This is too funny. The Cardhop icon (packed with “personality”) praised at the end of the blog post now looks like this: https://flexibits.com/img/new-fantastical/logo/product/cardh...
the old icon made me realize i yearn for something. it took me back to the first few versions of mac os x. i didn't realize how much i missed from those days, and now i both realize it and have a word for what's missing: personality.
it's kind of blowing my mind.