What are the modern design trends you hate most? Feel free to rant! Mine are:
- Physical buttons are out of fashion, now EVERYTHING must have a touch screen instead! Especially if it makes the appliance more inconvenient to use. Like having to press a flimsy touch screen ten times to scroll through a washing machine’s programs instead of just turning a physical knob and pressing a physical start button.
- Every website looks like it’s made for a phone and was vomited by the same app in slightly different flavors of vomit. And then having the nerve to tell you to download the mobile app 😑
- Why does everything need to be an app by the way? Especially when the only advantage the app gives you over the website is that you’re not constantly spammed with messages telling you to use the app… Are you making your website shittier on purpose so I feel like I have to use the app?.. I don’t WANT your app, you can shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.
- Actually EVERYTHING looks like it’s made for a phone… Like what’s the deal with all those hamburger menus on DESKTOP software? Please just put a regular menu and same me some pointless clicking, it’s not like you’re lacking screen space. I especially hate that those menus can’t be opened from the keyboard like regular menus. You know, “keyboards”? Those things that people on DESKTOPS use?
- All phones look the same. All laptops look the same. It’s boring as hell.
- Laptops must be as thin and flimsy as possible. Bonus points if you can’t even fit an ethernet port.
- I’m so sick of rounded corners everywhere… 😭
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Corporate whimsy. I forget what the name coined for it was. It has bubbly oddly proportioned people and pastel colors. As an example.
Touch screens on fitness watches is the dumbest shit. I straight up can’t use it while jogging and sweating. I just need a couple real buttons, but good luck finding that.
Car centric cities by far. Bring back walkable neighborhoods and give me options to move around instead of only being able to be stuck inside a car
- Light and dark modes with nothing in between. Platinum from MacOS and the default look from Windows 95 were crisp and bright without burning out your eyeballs.
- Wasted screen space. People laugh at Japanese websites for looking too busy, but I’d much rather deal with that than scroll for ages or look for links buried 3 levels deep in a hamburger menu.
- The idea that everything needs a backlit color LCD screen.
- Modern standby on laptops. Sure I could just hibernate it, but that’s very inelegant when S3 sleep was perfectly fine before.
- Glued-together electronics.
Everything in cars being replaced by screens. If auto manufacturers could figure out how to make the steering wheel a screen, they would. Impossible to work on those things.
- All new cars look the same and are way bigger than necessary
Actually EVERYTHING looks like it’s made for a phone…
Most people don’t use computers :(
I think the number of computer users stayed about the same, and the biggest Eternal September wave has seen at least 10x as many people getting online phone-only
Why does everything need to be an app by the way?
So they can track you and collect your data.
On that same note, every appliance being designed with internet connectivity when there’s no conceivable reason for it to be there. No, I don’t want my fridge or my thermostat or my coffee maker to connect to the internet. And I am never going to put one of those
surveillance devicessmart speakers in my home, ever.But if you don’t, how will they charge you a subscription for continued usage of your fridge?
What management seems as innovation should result in lost heads. Their lost heads. Fire those people.
PC towers that light up like a warehouse rave. I don’t need to signal to Rohan that my house calls for aid. It’s why I’ve stuck with a Fractal Design for the past 7 years.
The fancy light bullshit should be add-ons for people who want it, not baked in for everyone who don’t. And you just know they’re slapping a 200% premium on those shitty lights into the cost of the tower.
I’m on Linux which isn’t able to control the RGB lighting so it’s rainbows forever.
I was looking at pc parts recently and not only was there RGB towers… but also RGB CPU. And RGB GPU. And RGB RAM. And RGB fan. RGB pretty much everything… I guess now your computer can double as disco ball should the need arise
Hey I have that same case. It’s so beautiful compared to rainbow vomit.
Tbf when they first came around I was into them but that was over 10 years ago. Can we please all just move on from these. Please
- lights on everything
- diagonal house, what are you even doing?
- Increased phone power matched by increased surveillance and advertising
- hats not having an extra space to remove sweat and warm sticky air. Bring back lifted asian conical hats!
- App and website having different functionality, and you have to use the app
What’s a diagonal house? I image searched it but still not clear.
Slanted house, apparently. Just taking up extra space and annoying to place furniture.
😮
AI
I’m a graphic designer, so maximalism and antidesign. It’s taking a bit to become more than just a trend, but it’s getting there. I understand minimalism is getting stale, but the answer is not going for something hard to read. Even with proper hierarchy the sheer clash of colors, sizes, etc., will lead to a jumbled mess. Form follows function to make life easier.
A balance must be struck between maximalism and minimalism.
Minimalist web design is making me miss the mess that was the old internet. The terrible designs with dozen of bright elements all assaulting your eyes, the blinking stuff everywhere giving you seizures, the ugly animated GIFs whose pixels you could count, the absence of any coherence for colors and text formatting… It was awful, but at least it was interestingly awful. Each website had it’s own unique flavor of awful. Now it’s convenient, but it’s all the same flavor of boring and bland convenience.
I see your point, but… I don’t know. Nowadays, attention is a prime commodity. The easier something is to consume, the more people it will reach. And while that doesn’t matter as much in entertainment media, it has to be considered when designing for more important topics. Thus, media has to be designed to be read efficiently.
I don’t love how media is designed nowadays, precisely because it is monotonous and boring often, but I don’t long for the days when I had to look an entire page over for the bit of information I’m after. A balance can be struck through clear layout design and following trends that respect hierarchy. Maximalism does neither.
Though, I feel like I have to differentiate artistic media from informative media. Art can go bonkers, in fact art should challenge established tropes, but design should prioritize function over form, keeping in mind there is some room for aesthetics in there.
Again, I’m approaching this from an efficiency and ease of use point of view.
I do get the efficiency point, and it did improve accessibility massively. I don’t want to downplay that. Like not having huge paragraphs of text take the whole width of the screen anymore helped improve readability a lot. Or pages of text over a background image… that was a nightmare. But it would be nice to have efficiency and accessibility without every website looking the same. There has to be a way to make websites look interesting without the design hindering users from reaching the information they want… But I assume that it would require a lot more effort, and that’s not a priority for most websites. I guess the priority isn’t to look interesting anymore but SEO? Maybe it comes from the changing nature of the internet, with big websites getting most of the traffic and replacing everything else? Like having markets with crazy stalls everywhere replaced by malls… I guess it’s easier for a small website made by one person about a topic they are passionate about to take the risk of a creative design than it would be for Facebook to do it.
That’s about it. Clients often have an idea of what they want, inspired by stuff they’ve seen already. It’s just safer to request stuff that already works than innovate. So designers might have more interesting and readable ideas but they end up doing what the client wants anyway. Good way to see this is designer’s online portfolios.
A good client provides some guidance but offers a fair amount of freedom in regards to exploration, the average client has an idea of what they want already, and the worst kind of client tells you what they want from the go (because most often it just won’t work).
Flat pack furniture. Everything being reduced to the cheapest to make and cheapest to ship.
- houses designed as if they were some private plastic surgeon’s office;
- neopentec churches with black walls.
The home, back, and switch app buttons on Android being replaced with that bar like on the iPhone.
I especially miss the back button, swiping from the edge of the screen is nowhere near as ergonomic. It also replaced the ability to reveal the side panel by swiping from the left edge, so now you have to tap the hamburger menu way up at the top left corner of the screen for it, which requires either your other hand or you have to shimmy the phone down your hand until you can reach it.
Also, when you have a full screen video playing, you have to swipe up once to reveal the bar, and then again to actually close out of the app. That made sense with buttons but why the hell is it still the case with the bar?
Double tapping the switch app button to switch between the two most recent apps was also more convenient than swiping up to reveal the app manager and dragging the window to the right, and when you want to go to the previous app, whether it’s on the right or left side of the current one seems to depend on how long you’ve been on the app for, which means you can never build up muscle memory since it changes all the time.
Another case of Google trying to imitate Apple’s UX but seemingly not actually doing any of the usability testing and polishing that Apple does, and generally making it both worse than Apple’s implementation and worse than what was there before.
