Re UI, my theory is that this is partly because minimalism doesn't become dated as fast.
Related, I remember that what blew me away upon seeing the 3DS for the first time was not the 3d playfield (which looked exactly as I expected), but the UI in 3D. It really felt like a glimpse into an exciting future.
Here's why minimalism has such staying power. Fundamentally, pleasing design is about repetition and consistency. Brian loves patterns, that's all there is to it. Good graphic appeal isn't a seasoning like salt which you can just sprinkle on by paying for a few better "designed" assets. Its possible to make really pleasing design out of parts that are individually seen as cheap and low quality. Its also possible to make tacky tripe out of great quality parts. The important thing is consistency and arrangement. A pleasing design is one that lends itself to file compression.
Minimalism is a very easy style to pull off because the fewer elements there are the easier it is to make them all consistent, uniform, simple. It takes the least time to get it right. It can be handed off to someone else without explaining any "vision" or guidelines.
None of this is to say it is bad. Minimalism is good actually. Just that minimalism isn't uniquely good. Other designs can be timeless, they just rarely are.
I'm going to pull a print/graphic designer card and say that "minimalism" isn't actually a style. I think I understand how it's being used in this conversation as a shorthand for "2002-2012 Google UI", which had a massive impact on the way people thought about web design. But I don't think it's fair to say that the reason for the staying power of that particular type of minimalist design is simple repetition or consistency. I think it's a combination of laziness on the part of the designers and training of the population, and it has led to a lack of curiosity on the part of users when they're confronted with more complex interfaces. I think it's important to continue to buck that trend. Every interface should feel like a jewel box full of easter eggs. But having said that, design's purpose is to download information into human brains, and so [edit: clarity] the minimal opacity of the underlying information has to be the primary design goal in all cases.
Sometimes though, "minimalism" in the Google web design sense actually makes the information much too opaque. The ideal design requirement should be specified as that which gives the user all the tools to navigate immediately. If those tools are a little complicated, in the words of Thomas Pynchon, "Why should things be easy to understand?" This is where I have a huge problem with iOS, just for example, hiding scrollbars on components that don't obviously look like they're scrollable - so users never realize that there are more options off to the right. That's minimalist, but it's less than the minimum information you need to use the software.
What gets me is the death of decorations, and then trying to guess what interaction you're going to get if you click on a certain flat color bit of a background window.
I keep thinking back to the winxp to 7 era (along with the various windowblinds/uxstyle third party skins), plus various furniture, fittings or tools/utensils/appliances from decades/centuries past (so antiques essentially). The physical items would have textures from the materials used and the processes to make them, maybe they'd be gnurled to add a grip, but also elaborations that aren't purely functional or just to make it look nicer. When you're familiar with those visuals they do seem to help you know what part of it you're looking at, and how it's going to act if you grab/click any given point.
Scrollbars are now an annoyance (when they're not hidden) as they're often low contrast and made to fade into the background, just another dull rectangle in a sea of others, rather than a distinct bit of UI chrome. There used to be a unique inline and small grooves at the centre point as I remember.
I'm not about to declare having the pendulum swing to the other extreme would be better, but it'd be interesting to see it explored again.
Saying that designers are lazy and its their fault is a weak argument. For sure not all of them are lazy. Most of the time they are told what to produce.
What you are talking about is economics. Its possible to deliver good results faster/cheaper and the result is more timeless. Also clean interfaces are putting function and content in front. Thats why companies choose this.
So dont blame the designer but the boss/manager. Its like saying that app is slow because devs are lazy.
I'm sympathetic to working in big corporate structures as a designer where diktats you disagree with come down from on high. So I'm not blaming individual designers here. But I do blame art departments for not fighting back against non-artistic managerial marketing decisions, and some of that blame rests on art directors for capitulating, and some of it rests on designers for not making their opinions heard to the art directors. From a corporate standpoint, listening to your marketing team instead of your design department - and instead of having an open door to designers to walk in with ideas - is extremely limiting. It's not making the most of your resources. But design departments get a certain kind of laziness in their culture once it's the case that no one upstairs is going to listen, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think we agree on a lot of things which aren't vocabulary. Well, that and jewel box full of Easter eggs. I have no idea wth you mean or why non designers would care. But you've touched upon one of my biggest gripes, the difference between simplification and reduction. A simplification organizes information into useful patterns so that it can hide away redundancy. A reduction cuts information for the sake of presentation. Reduction can feel like simplification because the end result is a nice crisp aesthetic, but the difference is apparent when you try to use it. Its like the difference between tidying your room and throwing all your stuff out.
Designers tend to love the Vignelli map, but everyone in the city hated it and it was short lived. To this day you can still hear condescending remarks like the Vignelli map was "to abstract for NY". "NY choose the worse map". But its exactly like you said, first and foremost the point of design is to download information into brains, and by that metric the current map is far superior which is why it won.
Consider the background geography. Ardent supporters of the London Tube / Vignelli style insist surface streets are clutter full stop. Maybe that reduction of information makes sense in London and Europe where streets are a mess anyway, but in a grid city that reduction doesn't make sense. The present map simplifies the streets down to just a few representative examples so you know the local orientation of the grid and have a few reference points. Simplification, not reduction. The information is still there.
The coloring system is another massive example of simplification. The Vignelli map seems to hate information compression, insisting every line have its own color and own dots. The current map reduced clutter by organizing lines by where they run in Manhattan, denoting the express/local difference with black/white dots. Personally I think that symbol could be less arbitrary, but most people have no trouble figuring it out quickly. Its a simplification down to a single line which makes everything fit in a tight space while being easy to follow. There have been changes in service patterns which have ruined parts of the current map, but the very original version had some nice symmetry to it (and mostly still does). Even though the rule is technically "color by Avenue in Manhattan", that rule lined up with certain repeating "color zones", eg both South Bronx and Flatbush being Green/Red, Upper West side and New Lots being Blue/Red etc. You could sort of count on certain colors to be associated with certain broadly defined endpoints.
Perhaps, this example, being so utterly detached from the modern web design world, is one you might use simply because no one has any personal stake in it. Its a lesson designers should learn more often. Hiding and removing != simplifying. Good != pretty. Organize information well and its often close to pretty on its own.
(I have plenty of gripes with the present map but that's for another time)
Just want to say, I loved clicking on that mta.info link and seeing the SVG load in gradually, first the coarse map elements, then the coloured subway lines, then finer and finer details and labels. Felt like some kind of crescendo of dataviz, as if the THX sound effect ought to play over it. 10/10.
> Designers tend to love the Vignelli map, but everyone in the city hated it
Those designers were/are more illustrators than designers [1]. Design is, or at least should be, as much about the function of an object as about it's looks. A design that hinders functionality isn't a good design.
[1] I call the modern breed of such designers "Dribbble-driven"
> Fundamentally, pleasing design is about repetition and consistency.
Fundamentally, what makes design pleasing is super hard to reason about.
If it was mostly about repetition and consistency, any webpage that used bootstrap or no css at all would be pleasing. If pleasing minimalism was very easy to pull off, nobody would take note of Apple products.
Apple is basically Bauhaus for nerd stuff - and that is no small thing. Perhaps if the microcomputer had been first commercialised in Europe they'd all look like that anyway.
Cue Kevin McCloud from Grand Design whose standard rant about minimalism is that it’s actually the hardest to pull off because you aren’t hiding behind anything. All of your decisions are exposed, so you have to be even more thoughtful about attaining cohesion in the final form. Of course, he is talking about buildings which is a different thing, but I think some of what he says applies to other design fields too, including UI design.
See, me personally, this is what I want in my medical device software. Gimme the data. I'll learn the six different modes for each button, and fly through that shit to find what I want. Sadly, we're training people to live with less control and a shallower understanding by presenting everything in these slim little interfaces. Minimalism elides.
> See, me personally, this is what I want in my medical device software.
Minimalism is a major factor for cognitive accessibility. If you build for the lowest common denominator then of course qualities like control must necessarily take a dive. If Google gave you more controls for search then it'd be better search, but then it wouldn't be as minimal anymore.
On software you have lots of room to hide complexity for the pro user, but that's not the case for hardware.
Hah. There's truth to that, but just on a tangent, it got me thinking about the hardware of my youth versus the hardware of today. Like, when I was 8, the coolest thing to me was calculator watches. They had either 3 or 4 rows of rubber buttons, or the fancy ones had flat buttons. They weren't trying to hide their interface under a flat screen, right? They were going out of their way to give you lots of stuff to play with. They had different modes; you could cycle through stopwatches and alarms and little 1-line memos and addresses. They encouraged you to read the owner's manual that came with them.
Those systems taught people how to use them, and didn't necessarily sacrifice everything to a series of wizard screens. I think somewhere around the point where design decisions started being made to help onboard people into a piece of software or hardware faster, we lost the joy of digging deep in the user manual and finding cool shit.
That Casio calculator watch is still sold—I saw one in Walmart yesterday. I was also admiring a digital Timex Ironman watch that had an "OCCASNS" function, including customizable calendar and time-of-day alerts, which I had never seen before on those watches. It only took me a minute or two to figure out how it worked, even with a segmented LCD and odd contractions to fit the words on the screen.
(I settled on a classic analogue Timex with a leather strap. Can't beat them, really.)
I don't think we'll be seeing a move away from minimalism for the foreseeable future. The style itself will continue to evolve (hey, we just got rounded corners back!), but it'll within the confine of CSS so that no graphical/svg assets will need to be created.
We'll have minimalism until a browser maker decides to make background: golfstream-leather('brown') and felt-cloth('green') work in CSS.
I say this as a lover of Flash - This was exactly why when people picture "Flash websites" in their mind, they think of these fucked up textured insane things with interface bunnies strewn around a red pleather couch or something.
A recent trend seems to be to combine minimalism, tackyness and deliberate inconsistencies in order to feel more playful and friendly. IMO these designs are also clear, because they allow themselves to let things pop out and have very strong accents and contrast.
Minimal "flat" UIs are possible for normal people to implement. In the 2000s I had no idea how I was supposed to make a button that looks like it's made of drop shadows and fine Corinthian leather for a project in my free time.
(For that matter I don't know how I'd get it done for a professional project either.)
I was right there with you. I was very supportive of the improving app UI standards at the time but it started to feel like a contest of whose design has more visual complexity and nuance vs the real usability.
Windows Phone in particular was a huge breath of fresh air for me (rip) and Material Design a welcome evolution that I still feel strikes a decent balance.
The 3DS didn’t do anything for me and a large part of the population. The same goes for the 3D glasses that went out of style years ago. The main thing it did was give me and others a headache. Otherwise, this wouldn’t have been a fad.
Other than this demo, the only 3D effects that actually work (ie 3D movies) are in VR
The stability of the 3D feature was greatly improved on the New Nintendo 3DS, which added eye-tracking using the front-facing camera so that you could tilt and turn it and you wouldn't see a double image. I've never personally heard of anyone ever getting a headache from it, and it would be a bit silly not to use it because it doubles the screen resolution and makes everything much sharper.
Related, I remember that what blew me away upon seeing the 3DS for the first time was not the 3d playfield (which looked exactly as I expected), but the UI in 3D. It really felt like a glimpse into an exciting future.