[HN Gopher] The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism
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The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism
Author : makaimc
Score : 38 points
Date : 2022-06-23 11:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (webflow.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (webflow.com)
| excitom wrote:
| "The days of having entire websites rendered in neumorphism are
| behind us, but it will undoubtedly continue to have an influence.
| "
|
| Too bad. I personally think it's a huge improvement over flat
| design.
| koboll wrote:
| A web design opinion that has increasingly solidified in my
| thinking is that box-shadow should never be relied on to
| distinguish an edge.
|
| Not only is it (obviously) less distinct than a border or an edge
| where color changes, it breaks outside the visual box model of
| the page due to spreading outside the element's grid placement,
| which makes everything look less distinctly part of a grid. box-
| shadow, when relied on to distinguish edges, is anathema to the
| human visual system in an unconsciously subtle way. It's fit for
| light touches that add onto an already clear and accessible
| design but never for relying on to achieve clarity or
| accessibility.
|
| We realized this during the flat design era but then proceeded to
| overshoot things pretty far until exterminating shadows became a
| hot trend. Now there's a backlash, of which 'neumorphism' is the
| apex, which swings things too far back in the other direction.
| Just keep shadows light and use them sparingly, it's not too
| hard.
| 202206241203 wrote:
| In 2000s "Neumorphism" would have been a name of one WinAmp skin.
| In 2020 I guess a single style warranted a whole trend.
| dang wrote:
| 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. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no
| community, and that would be a different kind of forum.
| https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
| neinnonyet wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| antiverse wrote:
| This is a good take, actually. Especially in light of how so
| many corporations are using that strange design language with
| elongated/disproportioned bodies of people (I forget the name
| of it).
|
| Creativity in this domain is undervalued.
| 202206241203 wrote:
| _> ...strange design language with elongated /disproportioned
| bodies of people (I forget the name of it)_
|
| It's a design language that doesn't get one into a PR
| trouble, I get why it exists.
| _nhynes wrote:
| > elongated/disproportioned bodies of people (I forget the
| name of it)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
| mortenjorck wrote:
| "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
| exercise. I wrote back in 2013 about how these prescriptive
| labels obscure the tools they represent:
| https://interuserface.net/2013/05/flat-is-not-the-opposite-o...
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| 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.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| 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.
| skohan wrote:
| 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 pour a lot of
| effort into the UI, creating simulated lighting effects, and
| I'm glad I got to be a part of that period of app design.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| 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.
| skohan wrote:
| 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.
| sprash wrote:
| > 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.
| skohan wrote:
| > 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.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| 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
| johnsanders wrote:
| Did I miss something or was Neumorphism just that designers
| rediscovered inset shadows? We're just putting new names on a
| design cycle that's been going on for decades, maybe centuries.
| Things get more ornate until it's so over the top we wipe it all
| clean and start over.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Neumorphism really helped sharpen my thinking on a dynamic color
| theming system heading into Material You.
|
| Neumorphism had no grounding besides "what would trend on Dribbl
| that finally feels like a movement after years of iOS 7 aesthetic
| leading the way?"
|
| That isn't a design problem.
|
| "pure white background with overly dark blue", and neuomorphism
| was doubling on a very-not-skeuomorphic approach and attaching
| large shadows to it, simply because it created something "new"
| that felt "more realistic". No benefit to the user. No grounding
| in design principles.
|
| With Material You, sure, it's flat, but it's skeuomorphic in that
| _it works how color works in the real world_. (cf. Round Rects
| are Everywhere
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...,
| and replace with "Pure White and Black are Nowhere)
|
| Source: I wrote this, and also this post is my opinion, I do not
| speak for Google or its design: https://material.io/blog/science-
| of-color-design
| Scogle wrote:
| I feel like this article gets a few things dead wrong - mostly
| that this trend originated in 2020. Maybe the term came around
| then but this is what dribbble design has looked like since
| probably 2010 or 2011 (which is also around the same time the
| flat aesthetic came around, a decade after this article claimed).
| dchuk wrote:
| 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.
| rubito wrote:
| It's used in the Ford EV line: https://youtu.be/agpDIZmGRTw
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| I'm anxious to see flat go. It made everything look the same:
| cheap and without individuality. The opposite of diversity of
| ideas and the true spirit of creativity.
|
| And funny to see Neumorphism trend fading. Wonder if that
| actually will happen as I'm perfectly accepting of it.
|
| Neumorphism feels like the low-calories version of Skeuomorphism
| (which I feel is a big win over flat).
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Enjoyed reading the history. I would say that it wasn't really a
| trend to begin with. A few designers made some popular conceptual
| pieces that led to more conceptual pieces. Apple didn't
| meaningfully adopt it when they made a few sliders less flat,
| like in the new control center on macOS.
|
| Personally, I found the designs repulsive. That sounds like a hot
| take, but I actually found myself averting from the unnatural
| shadow diffusions and artificial heights in neumorphic concepts,
| the way some are repulsed by depictions of holes in solid
| surfaces or slightly distorted faces. I wouldn't want to have had
| to interact with many of those elements daily.
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(page generated 2022-06-24 23:02 UTC)