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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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).
Electronics that are damn-near impossible for anyone but a professional to repair.
Electronics that you can’t even TRY to repair because there are no screws, the case is just glued together. I had to use a flat screwdriver as chisel along with a HAMMER to open up some dead devices like mouse and controller to see what was inside 😑
I’ve recently determined for myself, specifically for this reason, any devices I want around my home for the future I plan to build myself.
A project box, a raspberry pi, and a few components can go a really long way.
I loath the modern obsession with minimalist, utilitarian design. Everything is just a white, black, or grey slab with no artistic thought put into its form. Buildings, homes, cars, clothes, electronic devices. It’s almost like a capitalist version of brutalism. Even the design of user interfaces is usually a pile of flat, washed out rectangles now. It’s like the soul has been sucked out of everything we make, reduced to it’s most basic form. It can feel anti-human at times. Like the world has collectively decided that beauty is a waste of time.
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.
UI elements that expand and cover up other UI elements when you mouse over them.
“Flat” color schemes where you can’t even tell where one UI element ends and the other begins.
Infinite scroll instead of pagination.
- Completely flat chiclet keyboards on laptops. It drives me absolutely insane because I can barely tell if my fingers are aligned with the keys. Thanks, Apple!
- Hidden controls on desktop software or desktop websites (ex: hidden exit, forward, and back controls on picture galleries)
- Hiding or collapsing scrollbars on desktop software
In general, it seems like there’s a major trend in design of form beating the heck out of function. It looks pretty! Who cares if you can actually use it or not?
I’d argue it’s less “It looks pretty” as “It looks modern™”…
You definitely have a good point!
Prompting.
Remember the day where you have to type commands on a terminal to do anything and some guy came up with “button” and “windows” and suddenly you could print yo document with a single click ?
Oh, cool, let’s bring back the trend of speaking to your computer through a text area !
Fuck LLM.
- 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.
Out of curiosity, what is the difference between older S3 sleep and modern sleep?
S3 sleep powers down all major components except for RAM. Modern sleep also keeps the CPU and network up, albeit in a low power state. It’s not always executed well, hence the reports of laptops cooking themselves in a bag or draining overnight despite being “in sleep mode”.
Ah, that’s exactly what mine does sometimes.
Also doesn’t hibernate write your RAM contents to your disk? That sounds like a great way to leak your passwords and encryption keys in plaintext. Also you need to always reserve the same amount of space on disk as your RAM and can’t use that space for anything else on the off chance you might want to hibernate.
Indeed. I have everything encrypted, but it’s still a waste of P/E cycles, especially when combining large quantities of RAM with QLC flash SSDs.
At least for windows the hibernation file is stored as a file on the C: drive, so will be encrypted by bitlocker along with your other data.
Wouldn’t that also mean that when the file gets overwritten, i.e the next time the system hibernates, you can potentially run a data recovery program on the C filesystem to leak its previous contents since modern filesystems don’t necessarily immediately overwrite the underlying data anymore, but usually just change the regions on the drive the file points to? So you could have ghost memory dumps hiding out in your free space just waiting for malware to access. You can definitely recover data from the free space of a Bitlocker volume because the encryption is transparent to the filesystem.
This is also why I don’t like swap files and always disable them (or use an OS like Fedora that doesn’t have them by default), because it kind of defeats the point of only storing some data in RAM for security.
I could just be ignorant of how memory files in storage are managed though.
Modern sleep keeps a network connection active so it can still check your email or whatever stupid reason they came up with.
I don’t think light modes were as glaring in the past, first of all monitors were smaller, second I don’t think they were as bright.
The ultra-dark dark modes really bug me, black with various shades of black or dark colors is almost impossible to see UI elements on easily.
Dark modes should be like in the 50% gray area, where it’s dim but things can still have good contrast.
Big phones. Why wont they produce anything that fits in one hand anymore?
For me it’s big phones being the most featureful phones.
Gimme a small phone with the camera array of the Galaxy Ultra and my wallet it yours
Of course a bigger phone fits more stuff. I dont really care about that very much though. But seems Im not the typical target customer.
Corporate whimsy. I forget what the name coined for it was. It has bubbly oddly proportioned people and pastel colors. As an example.
The advantage of an app is that they can use more permissions etc to spy on you even more compared to your browser.
And don’t forget the biggest plus; they can also sell your data! Isn’t that wonderful?
Also you can’t force an app to close for real and not access the internet to do heaven knows what, unless you install specific apps to force close them and control them, which most people won’t do since they don’t even realize that an app is not really closed when they close it…
Modern construction on a budget. It uses little more than reinforced cardboard and a moisture barrier. Sometimes the cardboard isn’t even glued or nailed in. So it can literally get unfolded by the wind, and suddenly the only thing preventing your house from getting water damage is a .3mm piece of plastic wrap that you HOPE the contractors didn’t damage or install improperly.
Here’s one such house. I don’t know if it would even last a decade without significant repairs. They voided the warranty on the roof already too, so you could be out tens of thousands of dollars before you even move in.
- All new cars look the same and are way bigger than necessary
slightly related but every time i see one of those pickup trucks i am reminded of just how big they are, like “how is this even allowed on the street” kind of big and its so annoying. if i got hit by one of those i would probably die immediately 😭
Colors. House color options are stupid as shit. Especially if you’re selling. Car color options. Why is everything so boring? Where’s the teal and hot pink, and yellow with red stripes, amd rainbow, and glittery purple, and burnt orange and…
All houses are mostly beige-y white, or soft dark colors or something boring. All cars are black, white, or boring shades of blue, maybe red. No interesting shades. And then the inside of the car is like beige.
Meanwhile electronics, especially computer parts have too many fucking lights that are distracting as shit.
Everything you said.
Programs > apps (in the sense of the word)
Everything looks nearly identical online
Stupid delayed popups right where you’re about to click
Websites making ANY chime/beep/noise in an attempt to direct you to their garbage robot support
Robot support
No companies having phones anymore…zero accountability.
Everything being forced to some social media garbage to tell a company how their service/product is broken and you need help
Stupid delayed popups right where you’re about to click
🤬
Right the robot support… Especially when the only way to reach support on a website is to go through the annoying support chatbot first… and it’s designed intentionally this way to increase the chances of you just giving up 😡
Robot support
I had a good, brief conversation with one the other day. I told it I was going to their competitor because they didn’t have annoying chat pop-ups.
