Light mode, Dark mode, and Gen-Z mode?(getfilteroff.com) |
Light mode, Dark mode, and Gen-Z mode?(getfilteroff.com) |
Disclaimer: According to my wife I am not to be trusted with decor choices.
What I desperately need though, is Boomer-Mode. It can be Boomer Light or Boomer Dark but when it is active both are 100% consistent. When I'm in Dark Mode I want everything to be light on dark, no exceptions.
Nothing drives my aesthetic sensibilities - as well as my aging eyes - more crazy than sudden contrast changes.
I don't think GenZ is the problem here. The bland corporate aesthetic that has taken over tech spaces is... bland and corporate.
Also, it's possible to have a colorful and energetic design while still being usable and intuitive. An app doesn't have to be minimalist to be functional.
I mean, the author has just a single data point.
The author's friend might just happened to have liked that particular design, and it might not be true for other Gen Z people.
This may be more a case of boomer mode, but I opt for everybody in software development to be put on customer/user email support for a while. It's very educational, humbling, and maddening.
You could have a giant flashing camera button permanently in the UI and you'd still get this question. People still can't find it or they can and then double-click it, shutting it down again. The amount of ways in which people can misunderstand even the simplest of interactions is a sight to behold.
This still pales compared to what for some websites/apps is 75% of their support requests: logging in. You think you've drawn out every process, sub process and exception, but people will find many new ways to screw this up.
One of the core UX lessons is that people don't read anything, so any instruction is in vain. They operate on vague patterns from other experiences, muscle memory and basically just click based on intuition, and if that wasn't what they wanted, they go back and try something else.
Although their particular design aesthetic is also very common in the NFT space.
So what is it? Colors? Animations? Gamification? Memes? "Crossing the line"?
I think, as a millennial, when I was growing up these elements were often design smells: only a boomer will use word art unironically, etc. our clean minimalism became the suffocating corporate vibe of the 2010s (via tech giant software).
Now, word art in the right context can be playful and imaginative without the boomer vibe. Hip startups are disrupting the suffocating millennial minimalism. Brilliant.
By the way I know this resentment is stupid and unfounded in any reality - its just a feeling I have.
I know this is all generalisation and not everyone born between two arbitrary years are like this - but the general vibe I get from their generation is that the kids are going to be alright.
I adore Gen Z.
Gen Z didn't believe anything they were told to begin with, because while Millennials grew up in the 90s and early 00s and got some optimism in our culture, America has been a polarized, rapidly-changing nation for pretty much all of Gen Z's time.
The tl;dr I'd say is: "Millennials had our expectations dashed, and Gen Z didn't build up the expectations to begin with."
(Note that I'm not commenting on whether this rapid change is good/bad/malicious/whatever. Just that how we've planned for and lived our lives has changed a lot in the last 15 years.)
Has the OP ever been to MySpace? Before Facebook came in and swooped all, MySpace pages all looked like that.
Is blingee GenZ?
Task is generally the correct choice. Consider two apps: One is playful, coy, energetic, private and safe. The other is efficient, prudent, clear and secure.
It’s likely you can confidently determine which is a dating app and which a banking app. If I told you one is a dating app for boomers and the other a dating app for millennials you’ll have a much harder time.
We (Millennials) mostly believed what we were told, due to both not having experienced a shock like that before + having more limited information access. Gen Z has enough contrary evidence and ability to share things that they just took a Fast Pass for the cynicism line. And good for them, honestly.
I like Filter Off, it's a breath of fresh air in the dating app space though the last time I looked at it it was mobile only which kind of dissuades those of us on the cheap end of the camera spectrum...
The first company I remember was Dropbox but they seem to have backpedalled on that when looking at their current homepage.
Gumroad or Xolo recently updated their websites and are perfect examples of what I'm talking about:
I'm so tired of every interface being just floating text on a white background with excessive whitespace. A border differentiating parts of an interface seems to terrify modern designers.
Back in the late 2000s, those laptops would be covered with various stickers -- Obama, sports, home star runner, etc. The last decade or so they have just been shiny unadorned metal or plastic.
This year amongst my 18 year-old students, the stickers have started coming back.
Hire an artist, get some kind of fun mascot drawn, make some font choices that aren't the same ten fonts that ship with iOS, get them to do some comps of really out-there ideas to make it a fun place to come look for someone to date. Right now it's just the Grey Zone. Come here to look for a grey person to have boring grey dates with. Woohoo.
Change the look now and then. For holidays. Big ones, little ones, local ones, made-up ones. A real-world meeting place would do this, why shouldn't you? Talk to the same artist about doing that.
Hell, even pick a day in the middle of winter to be Grey Dates Day and have a monochrome skin for laughs. Whatever. Get some color and whimsey in there.
(The post ends with "we're hiring a creative director" so I guess they're kinda looking for an artist now.)
> Apps like Seamless and Yelp listen in on our adult lives, then speak to us like children
> In the face of the overwhelming question — “What’s it for?” — a strain of avant-garde art responds by playing up its inutility, she argues. It magnifies its impotence until “it begins to look silly.”
> We cannot find food on our own, or choose a restaurant, or settle a tiny debt. Where that dependency feels unseemly in the context of independent adult life, it feels appropriate if the user’s position remains childlike, and the childlikeness makes sense when you consider that Yelp depends on us to write reviews, and therefore must, like a fun mom, make chores feel fun too.
> There is no better example of cuteness applied in the service of power-concealment than Pokémon Go, which is a large data-collection and surveillance network devised by the former Google Earth engineers at Niantic and then candy-coated with Nintendo IP.
At the time I was shocked - since when did the google UI become the traditional? They really had no clue how long it took us to get things look right.
I don't see myself as broadly similar to other people who happen to be roughly the same age as me. Then again, I'm GenX, so I guess I'm just cynical ;)
That app design looks like GeoCities barfed into a Unicorn Frappuccino. I don't see anyone (except maybe little kids) enduring it for long as a practical UI. As a bit of fun, like GeoCities pages were, sure, why not, but cloying UI becomes psychically fatiguing over time -- a lesson that could/should have been learned from the UI mistakes of previous generations, but alas.
Compared that to Instagram where the buttons are obvious.
Reminds me a post calling prior, post GAR generation trends as the 'gigabore': https://web.archive.org/web/20170731050026/https://medium.co...
We are essentially experiencing 'vendor lock in' in the digital design space, where the tools being used are no longer easily capable of exploring different styles of design beyond the current trend.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/9c/a8/7f/9ca87fcc3a2bed54edfb...
https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/02dcb79b40989932a37ce8...
https://cdn.dribbble.com/users/1866209/screenshots/8200836/m...
https://cdn.techinasia.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/iBooks...
I can see why the change from minimal to 'busy' would be the inverse when starting from a minimalist POV like the younger generations. Great article.
The younger people want the pop and sparkles. The older people want what they're using to simply work because they value their time. The pop and sparkles are a distraction that doesn't add to the functionality.
In other words, in the long run will this even be a problem anymore?
This boggles my mind that I can't have it in any OS or browser. The fact that I want muted-looking UX doesn't mean that I want the same for content. I can't read white-on-black text for longer than a minute.
The 3rd image was probably made in Figma or Sketch though. It would probably take more time to build that in Photoshop than Figma, and the result would be harder to make changes to.
As for "Gen Z preferences", I don't think there's enough to go on here to prove that. I'm over 35 and have watched user interfaces go from the the fun, colourful and UNIQUE designs of the 2009-era iOS apps to the hyper-corporate, boring af grid system that's "Apple Approved". Android is similar, w/ Material Design. I think they have a new one now that replaces MD, but I can't be bothered to look it up.
You're creating a video speed dating app. Dating is supposed to be FUN. Why design it like Zoom? Have you used trivia apps like QuizUp? You'll notice how different the design and dynamics are compared to most apps that are designed to render text/image data in specified fields.
Also look at TikTok/Douyin for an example of unconventional app design. They could have just copied Instagram, which is blandness personified. But they went with an unfamilar style that nonetheless took off. Nobody's asking "how do I turn my camera on" there, are they?
There were plenty of unique UI's in the 80's (every OS with a GUI had a distinct look and feel) and 90's (most OS GUIs had started to look and feel like Windows but a few daring applications took a chance to be different). Kai's Power Tools[1] was my favorite as it had a distinctive look and feel but was entirely functional. There were a number Mac apps with carefully crafted and unique UI's in the pre-iOS days which no doubt took a ton of effort vs. just making a bland Windows-esque UI.
It's not so much that developers stop wanting to push the envelope, it's that beyond being an early stage differentiation gimmick, users don't tend to reward them for very long for the effort. So developers focus on what they do get rewarded for which tend to be the checkbox features vs. their competition and the UI is demoted to whatever the lowest-effort fashion of the day is. Even Apple seems to have settled on slapping on a fresh coat of paint every few years and calling it a day.
At the basic level, both are built on a contemporary, minimalist UI discipline, with a similar approach to visually differentiating elements like buttons and fields. The later mostly distinguishes itself typographically, adopting a very trendy "brutalist" type family, with associated practices like mixing widths in the same line. The only other differences are more saturated, high-contrast colors and ambient animation.
The end result for the latter may be considerably less minimalist, but the foundations have a lot more in common than they have differences.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/android-12-the-ars-t...
—
And as to grid systems…well, that isn’t exactly a recent development. Design and typography has been dealing and fighting about grid systems for a long, long time now. This is not a new discussion. At all. We just generally don’t think a lot about the full history of design.
1) The important information is rarely the obvious thing on the page.
Partiful! Yay, party! Where? When? Cost? Oh, that grey on grey blob. Even filteroff, WTF am I searching for? Why does your "Ready for date night" take up 1/3 of the damn screen instead of something useful to me?
2) Interactable objects aren't obvious.
Presumable that stupid double circle is a trendy hamburger menu. Oh, wait, no, I've get a hamburger down and right. Whats scrolls? What clicks? And how do I go back.
As a side bonus, these types of Social Crapware apps (dating, party, etc.) have a special failure mode:
3) Design for these kinds of apps is ALL about attracting to your app lots of the cruise director type--generally a female who is nominally single and probably right in her mid-20s (age isn't as critical as female and nominally single).
Consequently, design for 25-year-old Anya supersedes ANYTHING else. Period. Bar none. What Anya thinks is good IS good and overrides any other consideration. Follow that trend or get kicked to the curb by the company who does.
Having worked at a company where our VCs demanded we "do what Google does" and then had to adopt the entire "design system" approach, it ends up robbing UIs of anything fun, because all UIs become "design by committee" by default.
Do you mean Material Design 3, or something else?
> "How old are you?" I asked.
> "Twenty-five."
> "Of course you are."
You will never, ever, ever do good design while holding your audience in contempt.
They are fully and completely entitled to their aesthetic preferences and those preferences have absolutely no bearing on their worth or right to enjoy the products they use in whatever way they choose to use them.
If you can't have enough compassion for your users to design something they love respecting who they are then you shouldn't be designing for them.
The mock [1] even radiates the "millennial snowflakes" energy that used to be prevalent, with the "You are unique. You are different".
Thinking about it further, I actually think this is a super clickbait way to get hits and link clout? If you look at their blog [2], it's really just advertising all of the different dating verticals this company runs. And gosh, the names are horrifically cringey. "Sappho Dating", "Matzoball Dating", "Subtle Curry Dating"?
1: https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/6197f007be798d88368f80d7/623... 2: https://www.getfilteroff.com/blog
He couldn't have known it, but at that very moment, the same conversation, and the same bewilderment, was being had, in offices over lunch hours, around dinner tables in startup work condos, all across America. Something had shifted.
In later years this age would come to be known as: The Dawn of the GenZ School of Itinerant Design. GenY art historians with goth hair and overcoats tried and failed to analyze it as a "return to the retro-aesthetics of MySpace and Geo-cities, heralded by Glitch", but the labels never stuck. Older, wiser and more bitter professionals, fustily defogging their glasses while seated defeatedly at their architect-style slanted drafting desks (with optional standing desk accessory), would oftentimes mutter to themselves, alone at night in their downtown 23rd-floor apartments, lit only by the synthetic warm-LED glow of their ironically chosen "Banker's lamps", a different name for this cultural watershed: "The End-times' Madness." But nobody listened to them anyways, and they didn't much care.
Well, I feel seen, except that it's a Tolomeo desk lamp and I keep a flat desk (with standing desk accessory) as I sometimes use solder in anger.
... that's a weird re-writing of history. The vast majority of people on MySpace never made their own webpages, and MySpace wasn't the first "customize my profile hosted on someone's site", as LiveJournal, Xanga, and others came before it.
And suddenly, I could comfortably read content again. For me, it was an amazing time, no more eye-hurting colors and fonts, but finally just nicely formatted text. Content was nice, ordered, and chronological. For me, MySpace and similar sites back then were like someone linking foone (sp?) twitter threads. I want the content, but I hate the presentation.
The "gen-z" look reminds me of the early web when people thought that <blink> and <marquee> were really exciting html elements. Those were noisy pages, but they had the feeling of an enthusiastic hobbyist scrapbook, and that was part of the appeal. "I could make something cool like that." That "artsy teenager's notebook" aesthetic is like the 90s web reborn in high def, this time with 40mb of javascript along for the ride.
As someone presumably from Gen Z, I find both interfaces either bad or terrible. The partiful design is outright tacky and looks terrible (nothing homogeneous, questionable design choices etc) but Filteroff has so much whitespace it feels like it was designed by soulless corps at Uber or Facebook who just studied from Pinterest.
And as a GenZ who's immersed in tech (news), the fact that this is the first time I'm hearing of Gen Z design definitely raised my eyebrows.
Heart broken.
But I grew to love the minimalism design.
Recently I started Youtubing and make designing thumbnails, minimal doesn't work. The demography 18 to 35 year old prefer something that quickly grabs their attention.
Amused to see the trend seeping into UI/UX as well.
Screens were tiny low res, mice had no wheels and people where not used to scrolling. I don't think <marquee> was originally intended as a toy, even though it was mostly used like one.
I did dark modes before it was cool, but now that I'm getting older, I want some kind of grey mode. Something that doesn't feel like I'm looking down the barrel of a flashlight nor something that's gonna cause eyestrain.
As for all the flashy doodads and movement. That's more designing for psychology than aesthetics. Movement looks exciting, and has been used successfully for years in other mediums.
Sincerely,
an old curmudgeon.
P.S.: Get off my lawn!
Now get off MY lawn!
https://medium.com/@h_locke/why-dark-mode-causes-more-access...
Ideally you want there to be a balance between the brightness of the room and the brightness of the display.
I'm not a gamer so maybe I'm just not used to it. Fortnite seems like another example of how "Gen-Z" and headachy a digital environment can be.
For sure people will downvote me for not being a gamer who gets it, or for being an old fuddy-duddy. Wanted to provide the perspective though.
Think it's just more the SV aesthetic that was spawned from iOS7 and Material design era forwards was originally meant to be the glass of water in the land of skeuomorphism has instead become the aesthetic of all products the optimize for conversion rather than experience.
All your kind of miserable experiences in the notification misery mobile world have the background muzak of iOS7 and Material design. It's almost like carpet and celling tiles of the DMV.
And west coast/SV just doesn't understand anything beyond this aesthetic anymore, there is no charm or whimsy in any of their products, even when they try to forcefully inject charm into it like with Memoji the end result comes across like a robot make it, it's just not actually cute or funny just feels gross somehow like there isn't any cuteness, humor or wit to any of it and it's super apparent when you compare it to similar products like Line Friends or even Bitmoji manages to have wit to their work.
You've pushed a whole generation of designers in SV to focus on the wrong thing really and this is why all these SV platforms will eventually be up for grabs and the ones that dethrone them are going to be coming from strange places and wont be understandable to the current platform barons. Look how alien Tiktok was to IG they're still trying to replicate it but its almost like they can't understand it and I don't mean because it's a Chinese product I just mean the muscles required to understand what make it great have completely atrophied in SV product designers.
Completely off topic, but why do I need to know your sexuality? Seriously, can we stop doing this? It does not matter.
It's a joke. Straight men are stereotypically less sensitive to fashion trends than women or gay men. He's using his age, gender, and orientation to make light of how baffling he finds the design preferences (and language) of other groups.
The Recyclable Camera Includes development, a prepaid mailer, & free shipping.
Photos are sent straight to your phone, where you can upload them to your Partiful party page.
Go ahead, make some memories
(The specs: Premium Kodak 400 ISO 35mm film with 27 exposures.)
Really? Everything old is young again!
Perhaps the author should also learn that just like there's a ‘fashion statement’, so there's a ‘design statement’—though I'm not sure of a proper term for that.
P.S. The imagined ‘Filteroff for Gen-Z’ screenshot is barely less sterile than the baseline, and it's almost textbook corporate bells-and-whistles to ‘reach the young audience’. Perhaps the author would want to run the imagined design by Anya again.
Overall, modern design is awful.[1]
Regards,
A Gen Z-er bitter that Win11 is going to bring round edges back[1]
[1]: Yes, it looks like I've run out of positivity for the day.
[2]: Rough edges of Win10 were the best thing about its design, that was otherwise questionable in other places.
I'm not a designer, but that's the first thing that comes to mind when I see the "correct designs." You have zero branding. What website am I even on?
Yes, the last few years has seen iOS design trends to learn towards sterile apps where there is little uniqueness across apps.
This is good for novice users, the consistency makes it easier to onboard into a new app. The downside however is that many apps feel the same and have little differentiation.
The solution is to invest in UX and design to find ways to give your app a personality while keeping with the visual affordances users have learned. The solution is most certainly not to add sparkles and off angle text boxes.
HN's clean interface means you focus on the articles, and one would hope (though not in your case it seems) take it atleast a little seriously/professionally in how you interact.
A speed dating app like filteroff? It's more casual, you should be at ease, it shouldn't remind you of MS teams.
2. This is an ad, and seems like it was intentionally written as flamebait.
Come on.
When your needs aren’t in alignment with your user’s needs then you’re the wrong person for the job anyway.
User feedback is important for getting additional insights, but the implementation of the feedback should always feel correct to you too.
People that aren't software developers and designers deserve to have good software designed for them too.
All you really need is genuine compassion for others to do good design for them.
It's a bit like only programming for one's own problems. Sure, some people can do that, but most need to solve other people's problems to pay their bills.
Interacting with Android's notification list while it's being updated is simply impossible if an app shows and hides progress updates multiple times per second when fetching new content, making the whole list jump up and down.
All those problems affect not just one generation and were solved at least a decade ago. And it feels like all I can do is press a few buttons for them or say "turn it off and on again", and yell at clouds inbetween.
These are both examples of Facebook groups aimed at a large but unconnected group of people from similar backgrounds. I think they can be fundamentally considered to be "subreddits, but on Facebook". Imagine /r/BlackPeopleTwitter but for (South/)Asians.
As someone with the right context in the target demo, I find "Subtle Curry Dating" to be a hilarious name. Not only that, I think I'd be more likely to find someone I mesh with on that service than the same service with a different name.
Edit: some cursory googling revealed that "Matzoball Dating" might be a similar sort of in-joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matzo_Ball
"Sappho"/"sapphic" are fairly common self-descriptors among teens/twentysomethings on a few subcultural niches like Tumblr. Ironically your own comment is an example of the tendency you decry; you're clearly not familiar with the markets at play here.
That is to say I personally wouldn't use a dating site themed around a reference for LGBTQ+ erasure. Though perhaps this doesn't represent everyone's opinion, and that's okay!
(For those out of the know here on Sappho/etc, see the subreddits /r/AchillesAndHisPal and r/SapphoAndHerFriend)
The amount of time wasted in Windows constantly changing the interface skin (especially the new taskbar that has lost a lot functionality in Windows 11) instead of fixing core issues in the OS or expanding elsewhere is a concerning cost of human time. I suspect many people buy "pretty" rather than functional but its kind of annoying the amount as an industry we waste on trends that achieve nothing other than a make over.
I'm still in my 30s, and I prefer the Millennial Minimalism now, but I didn't always. And I find myself bumping up the font size to 125% once in a while - and I expect to be doing it more and more as the years progress.
Cat photos with cut out style animation playing guitars. The whole electroclash thing. Just watch the music video for The Knife’s heartbeats.
I associate the sterile corpo chic with 2015 onwards because in my young adult days (2011-2014) we were wearing Aztec print stuff, ripped 501 jeans and iridescent shell jackets with fresh prince colour vomit snap backs, bright plastic sunglasses and abusing psychedelic amphetamines like it was 1988
That Joe Brandon has bio labs in the Ukraine too! Election stealing sonuva…
I feel that there was a transition period were you really needed to show of the new capabilities and colors that your computers can do now. But with current trends, this won't impress anyone anymore and just look cheap, so people got back to subtle, timeless designs.
[0] I'm assuming a well-done design - you can of course overdo it.
I agree that they are very different though. Windows 2.11 is a flat design [2], Windows 3 - XP are a design philosophy of physical metaphors.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x#/media/File:Windo...
2: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows_2.x#/media/D...
For me internet video speed dating is a concept that's fun, spontaneous, maybe corny. None of that is expressed in the filteroff design which looks more like an accountant's blog. It's a "filter on" look.
It looks like a defensive design intended to avoid criticism, but does that inspire users to go out on a limb and try a new form of dating?
Perhaps a different minimalist design (or changes to the copy text) could do the job, but this seems like exactly the type of app where a maximalist, colorful, tongue in cheek kind of design could have worked.
When a friend of mine saw Windows 8 screenshots his first reaction was "why does it look like Athena[0] widgets?" :-P
That's contradictory. "Flat" design is just text on a rectangle (at best); Windows 3.1 actually indicated what was a control and what its state was.
I'm guessing this time was when you were ages 15-25 or thereabouts?
I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary.
I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary.
Dammit, you got me. I was thinking of that age range exactly, and I'm always a sucker for a simpsons quote.
Though it is undeniable that "web masters" in the mid to late 90s were more willing to try wacky things, even on corporate or political types of sites. There weren't frameworks to keep things reigned in, and it was rarely a full time job, so the fact that it worked at all was enough for most people.
I'm excited for a bit of bang and pop and messiness and individuality to come back.
With it, I hope for return of websites. You can't display individuality on an endless scrolling feed of social media.
Many more people want the minimalism of a page that gets out of the way and shows you the content you came for, which was (if you like) 90s web design minimalism. That's the motivation all this gopher revival/gemini protocol stuff is about, at least from a design perspective.
I'm just trying to say there were different strains of "90s web design" which are not compatible with each other.
It's messy, chaotic, and feels like something from the late 90's/early 00's, where you'd often see custom web pages using formatted images as elements of the page. But I love it. I can't quite make sense of it, as I adhere pretty strongly to brutalism/minimalism when designing my own content.
I hope so, I thought that the original intent of it was anchored in a functional way of designing UIs. Now it seems to have been taken to absurd levels where important controls are hidden behind modals, dropdown, hover states, popovers etc. instead of just being visible and available when you want to use them. I really don't understand this but have given up pushing back on it.
Literally the thing that went through my mind when reading the article: "the 90s/early 00s design is coming back!"
Time to start replacing the cursor with unicorns barfing rainbows (or nyan-cats, whatever you prefer!) and adding on-click confetti explosions to our web pages again.
What an exciting time to be alive!
Beyond design trends and generational preferences, the purpose of the app in question matters. A video speed dating app should probably have a more fun atmosphere than Hacker News, Wikipedia, or the Wifi settings panel.
https://www.cameronsworld.net/
(which was the anti-trend to the original, booooooring beginnings of hypertext)
'All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.' — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
There are “fun” sites where proper UX, information hierarchy, and general good design patterns take a backseat to some wild design (band websites for example).
Then there are sites that focus on productivity which should have all the elements of good design. Craigslist is from the 90s, yet it doesn’t have sparkles and random shit scattered across the page.
Everyone is reminiscing about the wild designs of the past. How many of those sites you visited were actual productivity focused sites vs now? You can’t compare Geocities to Jira…
Minimalism isn't appreciated in some Asian countries. Their print, ads and web pages use every single inch/pixel to saturate it with the maximum amount of content, be they text or visuals. It even translates to physical products, as an example a laundry machine with 500 buttons and lots of blinking lights.
Humans naturally crave both novelty and familiarity and the tensions between those desires mean that aesthetics will always evolve and oscillate.
True. Buy my training is in military, process control, and nuclear. In those context, I've never heard a project manager say "make it look like a game". Whereas in business apps, I have heard that many times.
Just wait until someone proposes to build a blinky-clicky UI on top of the serious stuff to make it easier for users. No joke, I have that problem at work right now...
Visual graphix aside, it's just exhausting to listen to. Dude, take a breath, or at least allow your viewers to take one. Had to double check I didn't leave my YT player in faster than normal playback speed.
But it all gets better in your 40s. That's when you and your peers start to have enough power and money to be catered to. And when the 20-somethings start bitching about you.
> Older generations who think they know exactly what the younger generations
This is frequently called 'society'. Keep breathing long enough, you'll find yourself on the other side of that behavior.
I don't think this blog post means to stereotype all of gen-Z though. I think they're just using it as a foil to talk about the counter-trend to early-21st-century minimalism. That was in turn a counter-trend to late-1990s / early-2000s eclecticism like old Geocities.
--fellow gen Z-er
Design is somewhat of a fashion business and we've seen a period where simplicity and spareness has been the fashion. Apple's aesthetic by way of Jony Ive post-skeuomorphism is probably the most familiar example. But whether influenced by or part of the same fashion trend it's extremely widespread. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to find something of a backlash.
i'll go ahead and also point out where i see these trends are popping up all the time: web3 and crypto. notably, zora and the rainbow wallet do them well, i feel. i think you'll find that the design teams for these companies are pretty young. i even know of some high-schoolers that are part time employees for web3 companies (as designers).
i guess it's a little tangential but it's something i rarely see talked about with web3 -> they will succeed not because of the legitimacy of the technology but largely because of their appeals to the young*. young people love anything with hints of counter-culture and feeling like we're a part of a revolution; it's a thing, i think. though, decentralized stuff isn't really all that punk anymore...
--(another) fellow gen Z-er
* s/o Kropotkin
Isn't the author's description of GenZ essentially "Snap's UI"?
Also, the Wii came out in what, 2006? It's definitely a millennial gaming system.
In fact I can't think of another product that's more quintessentially millennial than the Wii.
The problem nowadays is that companies are incentivized to reduce visual clarity by selling super flashy rainbow skins(doesn't apply to Mario Kart, applies to Fortnite).
[0] https://twitter.com/cabbagebrains/status/1246155602625064961
As for user interfaces, video games are excellent case studies. My favorite example is the Ace Combat series. It shows how a functional interface themed after aircraft screens can be easier to manage than futuristic interfaces. At the same time, the futuristic interfaces manage to show a lot of geographical information in 3D instead of 2D maps.
It's always impressed me how much story telling is done through these interfaces. Before every mission, there is a briefing video where an officer explains context to the player and other pilots in the squadron. It's stylized as an officer literally booting up military software, authenticating with it and using it to present data.
I can't seem to find a single video of the menus themselves, apparently everyone cuts out the parts where they're navigating the menus.
Emergent over prescribed aesthetics.
Expose state and inner workings.
Dense, not sparse.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Regiment functionalism.
Performance is design.
Verbosity over opaqueness.
Ignore design trends. Timeless and unfashionable.
Flat, not hierarchical.
Diametrically opposite of minimalism. As complex as it needs to be.
Driven by specifications and datasheets.
Beauty emerges automatically without deliberation.
Do not infantilize users.
If you're interested, sign up here: https://berkeleygraphics.com/newsletters/
This is exactly why I can’t use MacOS anymore. It’s a neon-pastel-candy-colored, everything-is-rounded, excessive white space UI nightmare for me.
That being said it doesn’t invoke the feeling of a safe dating app to me.
I just checked and in Firefox you can also force text, background, and link colors. I imagine that breaks some things also.
Lots of websites load css from their CDN that is usually a CNAME, so a consolation prize of using uBlock Origin in advanced mode with CNAME decloaking and blocking third party sites by default is that text is often more readable (once you get to it, there is usually a bunch of extra random junk and only sometimes a "skip to content" link).
If light mode is too bright, it means your screen is too bright. It should be easy to fix.
That is a really good article by the way, thanks for sharing.
Though, if you must know: The US has clearly said there are bio labs in Ukraine, and that they've built some and funded others.
The United States, through BTRP, has invested
approximately $200 million in Ukraine since
2005, supporting 46 Ukrainian laboratories,
health facilities, and diagnostic sites. [1]
BTRP has upgraded many laboratories for the
Ministry of Health and the State Food Safety
and Consumer Protection Service of Ukraine,
reaching Biosafety Level 2. In 2019, BTRP
constructed two laboratories for the latter,
one in Kyiv and one in Odesa. [2]
[1] https://media.defense.gov/2022/Mar/11/2002954612/-1/-1/0/FAC...
[2] https://ua.usembassy.gov/embassy/kyiv/sections-offices/defen...
[3] https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/05-829-Ukra...
For another comparison: NewsCorp acquired MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. Six Apart acquired LiveJournal in 2005 for just a few million, and sold it to SUP in 2007 for somewhere around $25 million if I recall correctly.
Disclosure: former Six Apart employee, although several years after the sale of LJ to SUP.
[Edit] my english is bad... added some changes to grammar.
This IMO is what made Win8 so bad.
// braces for downvotes
..much like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
Antidepressants come to mind
Web 1.0 utilitarian design
You could even say it has fans.
It’s not random. Still has a theme and a palette. I like it as well.
I had fun reading it but I feel it is a bad business move to attack your user base, and I assume that they have more users around the 18yo of the spectrum than 75.
Would he also make fun of a boomer mode, with large buttons everywhere and "get me out of the app and just call person" feature?
I struggle with phone UIs but that feels like mostly because I can’t be bothered to guess at the “intuitive” ways I can touch a screen that do different things across apps. For instance, some of my video apps are double tap to fill screen, others are outward pinch (is there a word for that?), or a press of certain buttons, or they just don’t do it.
There is a way to design a more "fun" experience but just slapping the biggest tropes on like your users are 5 year olds is probably not it.
My first thought seeing the Gen-Z version was "why don't they show a flashing marquee banner, an email with flapping wings, and play some MIDI music while they're at it?"
GenX got ignored. The baton was passed from Boomers to Millennials. I guess we were all taking a bathroom break or something.
GenX UI, at least on the Web, was TABLE layouts with spacer GIFs dictated to us by Boomers who wanted brochures. Our crowning design achievement still lives on in WiFi router Web management tools and phpBB.
Yo, anybody going to the Phish concert? I need a ride.
Still being talked into seeing a-ha and Duran Duran. Go Gen-X!
There weren't enough of us. Also we were apathetic to everything. At least that's what I was told I wasn't really paying attention.
I'm waiting with eager anticipation to hear what wrongs our whole generation is uniquely responsible for.
laughs, then starts weeping in perpetual renter
Honestly, I've seen more camaraderie between millennial & genZ than adversity. Both of us got the luck to be born to "interesting times".
As a member of the Gen X community I am completely fine with this. Oh well, whatever, never mind us.
It's hand written. This was also an early web thing: no npm build pipeline. I feel a little bad not making the modal view fallback to image-is-a-link when JS is disabled (I also would've opted for no google fonts, but it ultimately isn't my site)
Meanwhile another friend built a similar site: https://kaeillustrates.art which may have more of that Gen-Z aesthetic (albeit we're millennials, so it doesn't go overboard) & is built on tailwind/react
Hopefully minimalist-as-fashion design will go away & minimalist sites can return to being small memory/dependency footprint
One note: can you tag that NSFW or somesuch? Even artistic nudity can be unwelcome and get people in trouble.
I mean, I do acknowledge how messy 90s websites were. Overly bloated with GIFs and annoying MIDIs playing on the background. But they were full of personality. And it was also a time where getting into "the internet" was an exciting thing by itself.
Only us, people who are "computer literate", complain about a 3mb download or 10mb javascript blob. Most people don't care as long as their phone or computer are able to do the job.
This is really colored by who you're paying attention to.
https://yesterweb.org/webring/members.html <-- this is a lot of Gen Z, especially with the more active people. Literally animated gifts, tiled bgs, etc.
> Many more people want the minimalism of a page that gets out of the way and shows you the content you came for
This is an assumption, not data.
It's almost like a charicature of 90s web design rather than actual 90's web design.
To be clear, I'm not saying they have bad taste. What I'm saying is that there's always design subcommunities who want retro this or edgy that, and they're kinda ridiculed or marveled at or admired for their distinction, or whatever, and then the majority of users look for something else for daily life.
It's a kind of design sampling bias or something. The huge swaths of genz who don't care or who like the minimalist stuff, or who say that webring is too much are off on TikTok or some other platform not bothering.
I don't know about the rest — might just be the video's author's style — but I have a feeling the high speaking speed is there because they're mostly reading a definition off of this article (https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Weirdcore), with no content editing to compress for time, but still a need to make the video feel like it's not "dragging on" for viewers who are impatiently waiting for visual examples. (The proper thing to do here would have been to do the content-editing of the script, of course.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUKPaCoQPEU
For those who don't get the farm auctioneer reference:
I'm literally a video editor/motion graphics person, so no, this doesn't take "literal ages" to edit.
There's approximately three animated memes per second in these and people are usually using pirated Vegas to make them.
I blame some late Gen-Xer who got stuck in a basement and got too obcessed with gaining likes on the internet they just morphed into this one-weird-trick pony with their clipart coming exclusively from 90's Magazines that come with a CD kinda thing
Maybe I’m overly sensitive, but I’m really tired of ADHD ableist jokes like this one. With the controversy and struggles of medication for ADHD, implying that the only functional ADHD brain is a medicated one just frankly sucks.
Yes, I would suggest in this specific instance you are.
>but I’m really tired of ADHD ableist jokes like this one
Not once did I mention ADHD which is a medically recognized condition. However, the use of Ritalin in today's society is not limited to those that are prescribed Ritalin as a treatment for ADHD. There are many many people that use it recreationaly. Being around people using it as an upper gives me the impression that I'm stuck in molasses with their hyper-everything. It's exhausting.
"Needs to up their dosage" would imply someone who medically requires Ritalin to treat something, which could only be ADHD. Take that part out and the joke is otherwise fine/about what you're saying.
This would be common knowledge amongst people that have spent any time in an edit bay as a client or as an editor. It's one of those things that those that know just sit back and smile while those that don't are in awe.
Besides, pointing out ableism isn't an accusation. In fact, I don't accuse you of anything personally, I bemoan the joke. In the face of this, you retreat to a scenario where you are besieged every day by recreational Ritalin users in order defend your ego from maybe admitting your joke wasn't actually funny (or accurate).
However, anyone familiar with recreational drug use knows there's a common phrase of "know your dosage" right along "know your dealer". Yes, it's borrowed from else where, but it's still a thing. Do I need to eat half a bar, or take 2? I might suggest Wolf Of Wall Street as an example of knowing one's dosage.
Taking "too little" Ritalin recreationally — i.e. not meeting the threshold dose — doesn't result in ADHD-like symptoms.
Unless, y'know, you have ADHD. In which case it's not "recreational usage", you're just self-medicating.
People taking Ritalin when not prescribed to them by a doctor do not care about ADHD-like symptoms. They are using it purely as an upper. "To help them concentrate" or whatever they tell themselves. It's less "trashy" than meth, easier to find than coke. The affects are also different than these other drugs.