[HN Gopher] The Reemergence of Style in Software
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The Reemergence of Style in Software
Author : sundaypancakes
Score : 76 points
Date : 2021-10-16 05:31 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (future.a16z.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (future.a16z.com)
| gjvc wrote:
| This article takes many words to say very little. If anything,
| "style" in software peaked in the public mind with the rise of
| Mac OS X in the early 2000s where the Aqua theme was juicy,
| looked like you wanted to lick it, and combined with things like
| the genie animation gave Mac OS X a wonderful sense of character.
| (Probably peaking at 10.6/Snow Leopard.)
|
| This character has been systematically removed from the system
| since then, with successive updates since Apple began, lemming-
| like, to follow some "thought" "leader" in "design" believing
| that flatness in UI design was somehow "modern" and innovative.
| (The irony is that the flat buttons use less CPU/GPU power to
| render than the shaded three-dimensional ones which preceded
| them, something of which we now have orders of magnitude more.)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Modern software's humdrum lack of identity has resulted in
| users craving more interesting, opinionated tools, tools that
| feel like us -- or a better, more interesting, wackier version of
| us._
|
| The above is the kind of sentence that you'll see in almost any
| fashion or arts magazine.
|
| Pretty fluffy stuff. Not really the kind of thing we're used to,
| in the engineering community.
|
| That said, I firmly believe that there's always a place for good
| graphic and interaction design, in technology.
|
| I don't feel that it's a problem. Some companies will stick to
| "the classics," while some will go overboard with the
| "chrome"[0], so to speak.
|
| [0] https://www.mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html
| [deleted]
| prox wrote:
| I am going to make a claim as someone who works in both the
| crossroad of devwork and design that there is not one piece of
| software that caters truly for the artist.
|
| Every piece of software for artists / designers is not
| intuitive. It's sliders, knobs, modals and panels. Programmers
| making design software is Not A Good Idea.
|
| The way forward is something like ProCreate, so just the
| software and the pen, and maybe more auxiliary devices (a color
| palet for instance) to become more analog again.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| What do you want, an AI that reads your mind and generates
| the exact art you want? Barring that, a perfectly intuitive
| tool is impossible past a certain point of complexity. If you
| want something in front of something else you're going to
| have to learn what a layer is. If you want something at just
| the right transparency you're going to have to adjust the
| transparency.
|
| Maybe some kind of virtual art studio in VR would be helpful
| for people who want a more physically intuitive experience
| with some extras like undo and saving copies, but even then
| you're still going to have to learn a thing or two about the
| tool to use it, like any tool.
| ksec wrote:
| >The way forward is something like ProCreate
|
| You mean [1] ? I dont disagree with your point but I dont
| understand how pro create is any different to any other
| design software on iPad.
|
| [1] https://procreate.art
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| ProCreate works very well with the Apple Pencil.
|
| The Apple Pencil, and the iPad Pro (esp. the latest of
| each), is awesome. They did a really good job on that.
|
| I don't use ProCreate, but that's mostly because I'm not
| really that kind of graphic designer.
|
| I remember looking at "paintbox" tools for video effects,
| in the 1970s. We've come a long, long way, and real artists
| have some really nice tools at their disposal.
| ksec wrote:
| So it is Apple Pencil that is making the difference, Not
| Pro Create?
|
| Because parent mention Apps were the problem? Or is it
| more like Apps _designed_ for Apple Pencil will be the
| future? Not mouse and keyboard?
| prox wrote:
| It's the intuitive way you can draw without endlessly
| dialing knobs, tweak panels and so on. It's fluent, which
| I feel, a lot of apps lack. I love to see more UI / UX
| creativity.
| theaussiestew wrote:
| I'm very curious about what you mean specifically around
| UI/UX creativity. I do agree with you though, which is
| why I've been trying to build an app that has more
| "creative" and non traditional UX elements.
|
| I also feel that an 'Ink-Board' should replace the
| trackpad as we know it. Basically an E-Ink tablet that
| serves as a stylus, pointer and control input. So that
| we're not limited to discrete inputs (as opposed to
| analogue inputs).
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's been a long time since the unique and slightly bizarre
| Kai's Power Tools:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai%27s_Power_Tools
| prox wrote:
| Yeah, and in many ways, we haven't seen many more trials
| like that.
| andybak wrote:
| So I read the first sentence and my immediate reaction was
| "Well I don't. And I'm not sure anyone has ever expressed that
| opinion to me" and I stopped reading.
| agumonkey wrote:
| There's a bit of truth. The era of extremely engineered
| everything gave birth to flat design for instance. I'm not
| pro skeumorphism but I remember how odd software felt good in
| a way. As long as it was fun (good boards, useful programs)
| you ended up liking the quirks.
| andybak wrote:
| I don't disagree but I didn't get any of that from that
| opening statement. It seems to be arguing for diversity in
| UI which I happen to think is usually a terrible idea.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> It seems to be arguing for diversity in UI which I
| happen to think is usually a terrible idea._
|
| I have to agree with this sentiment. I _loved_ KPT, but
| that was more for the "adventure" aspect. I actually had
| difficulty using a lot of functions (don't ask me to
| remember which ones).
|
| It's frustrating, designing innovative UI that also
| follows convention. It's a joy, when it works.
|
| I have this iOS widget that I wrote[0]. It's really,
| really cool. Works a charm, and is easy to implement.
|
| But I keep on not using it in my projects. It's too "in
| your face." I think that UI needs to get the hell out of
| the way, and just let the user do what they want to do.
|
| I have a couple of more, more conventional widgets, that
| I use all the time[1], [2].
|
| KPT was "in your face," like no other UI I have ever
| experienced.
|
| [0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-
| projects/#RV...
|
| [1] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-
| projects/#RV...
|
| [2] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-
| projects/#RV...
| coldtea wrote:
| Well, here's that opinion: today's flat UIs all look the
| same, boring, and bland. I wish there was more quirkiness
| too. Perhaps not to Kai Power tool's levels, but I enjoy the
| functional quirkiness of many VST UIs.
|
| Now you can continue reading. Seldom anybody learned much,
| when they stopped reading at the point they disagreed with.
| andybak wrote:
| I want my UI's to be usable. I want it to be immediately
| obvious what I need to do. I want them to become invisible
| in the same way good tools do. I don't want my hammer to be
| quirky, I want it to be an extension of my hand.
|
| EDIT - Yeah. I have a certain fondness for Kai's. But I had
| time to get used to them. It's one UI in a thousand where I
| have time to get bedded in with it's quirks. For all the
| rest - be boring.
| Akronymus wrote:
| > That said, I firmly believe that there's always a place for
| good graphic and interaction design, in technology.
|
| Form should come after function. But often times form actually
| contributes to function. (In the sense of making the "right"
| thing intuitive to do)
|
| Function is IMO always paramount.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I've found the process to be iterative. Chicken->egg-
| chicken->egg... etc.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| > blase, blue-branded modern tools
|
| Physician, heal thyself! :-)
|
| Also - it's a little depressing to see the Cambrian explosion of
| graphic style in the first 30 years of consumer software reduced
| to Windows and KidPix. Oh well, I guess it's on me to "be the
| change I want to see in the world" and do a blog post with some
| other examples!
| JustAnonymous wrote:
| Modern UI/UX design is mass-produced, homogenized rubbish. The
| cadres who have plunged us into this abyss of anti-usability can
| no more be relied upon to undo their mistakes than they could to
| come up with a usable design to begin with.
| colesantiago wrote:
| This is peak a16z marketing hype.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Going off on a tangent here but I clicked the link explaining why
| tower PCs used to be beige and it made me realize that my career
| didn't overlap with the era of cubicles - I entered the job
| market at a time when the norm was an open space plan.
|
| I wonder if I would hate the cubicle as much as I hate open space
| offices?
|
| Can anyone who's witnessed this transition weigh in?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| yes - I worked in a computer-aided chemistry company as
| software engineer in California in the 90s. The culture there
| was from the 80s, but the scientists were very hard working!
| (scientists may not write very good code but you know, they can
| write a lot of it! athlete/scientist was common in my group). I
| was making pretty good money and my father wanted to see where
| I worked once. So I used my badge to walk in with the two of
| us, to a ~10 meter x 16 meter open room, with about four glass
| walled offices on one side and the rest of the area with
| cubicles.. maybe two dozen or more.. some of the cubicles were
| "big" with a table, some medium, and then a number of ordinary
| ones. I was used to it, but as a male, I could see over the
| cube walls while walking, whereas shorter colleagues could not.
| Other small things about it at another time.. (some offices at
| Apple Inc, Cupertino were also laid out like that -- maybe they
| got it from their HP-imported managers).
|
| My father was silently aghast.. he was actually startled by
| seeing everyone in the room like that.. all the commotion. It
| had never occured to him that people could be arranged like a
| lab rat-maze (which it was really).
| Icathian wrote:
| I've just barely bridged it. Cubicles were better I think. It
| wasn't real privacy but it was at least something.
| notpachet wrote:
| You'd have hated cubicles too, before open office became the
| norm. Cubicles were the open office of their day. Before them,
| it wasn't uncommon to have an office with your own door. Or at
| least sharing a larger office with another person.
| heymijo wrote:
| > _Can anyone who 's witnessed this transition weigh in?_
|
| Sure.
|
| If you don't like the way you are treated in your organization
| today in an open office, you probably wouldn't like the way you
| are treated in one with cubicles.
|
| Cubicle environments could be soul crushing (see the movie
| Office Space). They offer a bit of privacy, but noise,
| interruptions, a boss peering over your back at your screen
| unannounced could all still interrupt flow and focused work.
| amelius wrote:
| Cubicles were not that great.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtTUsOKjWyQ
| wruza wrote:
| I read it two times and didn't get the point. It seems to me more
| like a bit of history and state of things article rather than
| reemergence examples.
| sesuximo wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about elegance in
| swe/implementations
| zh3 wrote:
| Submitted previously 6 days ago:-
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28812639
| coldtea wrote:
| > _By designing everything on the screen to be as photorealistic
| as possible, the software essentially negated needing to define
| its style or stance -- it merely reflected the world outside of
| it._
|
| Not even close to reality. Aqua, iOS "skeuomorphism" had a very
| defined and unique style.
|
| It obviously wasn't some photograph of an actual desktop with
| some folders on top and a garbage can, as this makes it sound
| (not to mention that even if it was, there are 10000s of ways to
| have a unique style and stance in a photograph too).
|
| Hell, old "photorealistic" GUIs were even MORE distinct from one
| another than today, with everybody having their same-looking flat
| UIs.
| quonn wrote:
| Or maybe there are few startups with real innovation that is safe
| from excessive competition, so now software has become merely a
| fashion as a substitute for innovation?
| gumby wrote:
| I think this is an undergrad paper published on a blog.
|
| It's hard to see if this article is really making a legit point,
| from a confusing typos early (swapping "form" and "function", or
| claiming beige was used in software, when all displays were
| monochrome back then) to pulling out random historical artifacts
| apparently without understanding them (the Star's portrait
| display was not "distinct"; on the contrary the switch to
| landscape happened in the mid 80s; the _first_ Mac had both a
| distinct physical design and graphic clues like the trash can and
| floppy disk; those were not introduced in the 80s, etc).
|
| Laid upon that are a few anodyne design "observations" that have
| been common in graphic design articles since the early 20th
| century.
| makk wrote:
| Yeah, what is going on with the a16z blog?
| pjc50 wrote:
| The claim was that beige was the color of hardware (accompanied
| by a link discussing this claim). Portrait displays have never
| been very common (TVs were always landscape). This feels like a
| particularly picky bit of nitpicking.
| gumby wrote:
| Criticizing a comment for its picayune choice of criticism is
| quite reasonable, but in this case I don't think applicable.
|
| I simply picked those as examples right from the beginning of
| the essay: the old workstations like Alto, Dorado, Dolphin,
| Dandelion (Star), CADR, LMI, Explorer, PERQ, blt, and even
| the old AAA were all portrait. That _was_ the context into
| which the Star was released. It was seemingly the workstation
| form factor until the arrival of the PC. Likewise the
| sentence reading "Early computing _and software_ stuck to
| shades of black, white, and beige " (emphasis mine). I only
| mentioned the nonsense about the trashcan later to
| demonstrate that this was a pervasive problem, rather than
| merely one brainfart at the beginning of the essay, which
| could have simply been poor editing.
|
| A deeper example (which I cited) also shows up right up
| front: the complete misunderstanding of form vs function that
| implies the author really didn't know what they were talking
| about (to cite that is to pull in a century of famous
| discussion; if you don't understand it how could your
| argument reply upon it?)
|
| I could go on but this essay isn't worth my (or your) time.
| There is a very interesting argument to be made on this
| topic, but this blog post isn't it.
| base698 wrote:
| The article mentions crypto being a leader in this return to
| style.
|
| Some examples:
|
| - https://apeboard.finance
|
| - https://curve.fi/
|
| - https://opensea.io/
|
| - https://www.trufflesuite.com/ganache
| celeduc wrote:
| "a16z" must have an entire team dedicated to generating and
| promoting clickbait articles for HN.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > These aesthetics were both compelling and immediately
| understandable to newcomers
|
| I liked skeuomorphic and i think most people find it comfortable
| because it s familiar. What followed that seems (from the user
| perspective) like a horde of conceited designers who think that
| the user should suffer for their superior designs. Wasting
| people's time trying to find where the button is, if it's pressed
| , or what it means, is not cool. Bicycles for the mind should
| make us go faster. I don't see any return of style, i see more of
| the same inanity, like e.g. twitter's latest redesign
| agumonkey wrote:
| I think skeumorphism is ok as long as it doesn't forget it's
| software so physical limitations don't have to cripple the
| application. Best times is when you have a bit of skeumorphism
| and a bit of software extensibility / genericity.
| schleck8 wrote:
| I don't want to know how much money was paid for these logos
|
| https://future.a16z.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Logo-Tran...
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Can we also talk about how everyone's clip art looks so much
| alike? All those tubular-limbed primary-colored simple sausage
| people make me wince. I guess when you're making the 10,000th
| SaaS you just want to be like the others.
| Lammy wrote:
| It's a nice way for companies to look diverse without
| actually being diverse.
| jkestner wrote:
| "The style appears to serve as the illustrative arm of an
| intentional deployment of cheerful minimalism to mask the
| insidiousness of multinational tech corporations with
| friendliness and approachability."
| https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-
| armed-...
| tenaciousDaniel wrote:
| I didn't realize Pinterest had fallen victim as well. Never
| really liked the platform but always liked their logo. Sad.
| legutierr wrote:
| I would barely call them logos. It's like they found the name
| of the company mentioned in the title of some blog article and
| just took a screenshot.
|
| The new Pinterest logo is downright offensive, given how great
| the original was.
| schleck8 wrote:
| I totally agree. The old Airbnb logo communicated the 'air'.
| Now it's a salmon pink (??) generic sans serif type with a
| just as generic A icon
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah the old Pinterest logo is great. The old Spotify logo
| really isn't. Which is not to say they did a very good job on
| the new one....
| mjw1007 wrote:
| << By appealing to everyone with these clean lines, gradients,
| and rounded shapes, no one feels particularly compelled by
| them. >>
|
| To be honest, I think this bit of fashion is just a pendulum
| that swings back and forth every decade or two.
|
| One curious thing I noticed on the swing back in the opposite
| direction around the early 90s (when many logos changed from
| circles and constant-width strokes to ellipses and more
| 'stressed' letters): the new logos somehow seemed to me to be
| "cleaner" than the previous ones, even though that's also what
| I'd felt when things were going the other way.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I disagree that this is a fashion -- logo design over the last
| 100+ years has consistantly shifted this way, while the media
| they are communicated in has engendered lower and lower
| attention span, vastly faster exposure rates per day, massive
| audiences.
|
| The information in the logo is being reduced for specific
| reasons. I agree that this is de-facto loss of diversity and
| culture for delivery, somewhat analagous to factory methods of
| goods production.
| Frost1x wrote:
| I don't think it's just analogous, I think it's directly
| related. Taylorism imposed on society by the most greedy
| amongst us is, in my opinion, the cause of this as they've
| become (or perhaps, always were) the axiomatic drivers of
| policy and power in western society and culture.
|
| My opinion is that this trend is due to a signal we're seeing
| where people are being pushed towards efficiency goals in
| their lives _constantly_ due to pressures presented on them
| much of which flourished during the industrial revolution and
| carried through technology in the information age.
|
| I used to enjoy looking at something and taking 20 minutes to
| explore what exactly it is and assess it, it's uniqueness or
| lack thereof, and so on. Now, 20 minutes is too much time,
| when I want or need something I just need Solution for what I
| need so I can move to the next step of my life. I don't have
| time to figure out what your product or service is, I need
| Solution and you either offer it or not, I don't care about
| your aesthetics or how nice it is (I do but thats often just
| a bonus anymore as long as it accomplishes the goal).
|
| Heck, I don't have the time to check the space of Solution
| competitors to find what I need, I even outsource that to
| third parties to tell me what's good and not good. There are
| too many pressures in modern life for me to care and you
| better tell me what it is you do and better do it because it
| will effect _my_ efficiency which directly impacts how much
| actual free /leisure time I do or don't have outside of my
| constant efficiency pressures at every turn, from everyone.
|
| In a world with less pressures of efficiency and ROI, we're
| more willing to explore things when failure is acceptable and
| the risk is more worth the potential of enriching our lives
| by taking a chance on Solution and see what it's all about.
| Hyper competitive societies don't allow this slack space. If
| you take this path you better hope the risk was worth it or
| you're wasting piles of time and money you already didn't
| have.
|
| While efficiency is important for healthy progress in society
| and a lack of pressure leads to complacency and stagnation,
| it's possible to go to extremes in either direction and I'd
| say weve crossed that point as a society on the productivity
| push. Some amount of leisure and excess are needed for human
| happiness. We see this everywhere, "does X, fast, cheap,
| best."
| fidesomnes wrote:
| mulieres perdita omnia.
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(page generated 2021-10-16 23:02 UTC)