What's old is now new again. The fashion industry has known this for decades, and the tech industry is catching up to that.
You know what comes after "dimensional" design? Radicial minimalism.
"Once you strip away everything extra, everything ornamental, what remains is the truth, and nothing more" There, I wrote a tagline for design trend of 2030.
"What was once considered truth in the design sense has been replaced with complacency and a stifling regression towards the mean. What we offer is an alternative; boldly intricate designs, showcasing skill, attention to detail, and a human-first detail orientation unmatched by the AI systems flooding our daily lives" There's 2035's
Hasn't minimalism been the dominant trend for well over a decade now? Surely it'll need more than five years to cool off before it makes a return, assuming it even leaves.
Just a minute ago, I clicked a "Transfer" button on my online banking UI. It's a beautiful button with an appealing font and a subtle, pleasing background gradient. But when clicked, it shows no indication that it was depressed, and I have to rely on the appearance of a modal spinner to know that I have actually pressed it. For me, peak UI was Windows 89/2000 -- largely uniform and monochrome, but just enough detail in the third dimension to know where to click, and what to expect when clicked. Also: keyboard shortcuts.
In a desktop application, if a button stays in the pressed state when you let go of the mouse button, it means that the developer was lazy and is doing work on the UI thread. In a classic Windows UI, the transfer dialog would be closed, or it would disable all controls until the operation completes and then show a confirmation message.
Actually, the developer should really do some work in the UI thread beyond just sending out a "button pressed" message: When I press the button, I need immediate feedback that it was pressed and that pressing it had an effect, that things are now happening. Too many UIs, especially in the web where round-trip-times can be long, rely on just firing of a message or a network request. The response to the user, by displaying a spinner, progress bar, modal or new page only happens asynchronously and after a comparatively long delay. This means that users will sometimes repeatedly click because "nothing happens", leading to multiple messages, leading to multiple actions, leading to a big mess.
So the UI thread should synchronously trigger user feedback, take a lock or other measures to prevent unintended repeated actions and start a timeout callback in case the triggered action doesn't happen in a sensible timeframe.
This is what actual UI design is supposed to encompass. Making sure the software behaves in the way the user expects, effectively communicates state, etc. Not just fussing over icons and colours.
It is perhaps a problem that there are a lot of visual designers around, because that is something for which a classical education exists and which has a certain prestige, and very few UX designers, for which no classical education exists and which seems to have little prestige. Good UX design is usually not fancy, form follows functions isn't flashy, and the whole thing seems kinda nerdy (not cool).
About the return of skeuomorphism, I do believe it's happening because people are fed up with flat everything in two colors, but I wish there was less oscillation around the center. As many have mentioned, Win2k was very good, and it was a middle ground between the extremes we're seeing today. Actually, it was extreme in one way: you could tell what a UI element was going to do without trying to click every pixel and seeing what happens.
Users' expectation changes. You ask someone who grew up with Windows 98 and they will tell you that d'oh of course onscreen buttons should have a depressed state to indicate they are pressed. You ask someone who grew up with Snapchat and the entire idea of having buttons is optional: tap on this area of the screen for this functionality, tap on that area for a different functionality, and swipe left for this swipe right for that with no indication that the UI is even swipeable.
> For me, peak UI was Windows 89/2000 -- largely uniform
The UI back then was sometimes janky, but it was so much more useful. Icons were meaningful and easy to recognize despite the low resolution. Quite often interfaces were customizable, they were not afraid of users becoming power users. Peak UI for me was probably Winamp 2.
Nowadays it is just a bunch of flat glyphs, things hidden in hamburger menus, arcane submenus, etc. Probably done to increase "engagement" or whatever bullshit metric they want to minmax for.
It’s not a loop, it’s a spiral. Each idea brings a (partial over-)reaction to the last one.
For example, flat monochrome icons emerged, because previously the UI was massively overshadowing the main content [^1]. So we traded the recognizability of icons for a better overall hierarchy in the UI.
Now that this problem is solved, designers are looking to reintroduce recognizable icons without sacrificing the previous goals. In the AirBnB app, you’ll find that the busy icons are only used when they’re the main focus. Auxiliary icons remain flat.
There can be multiple reasons. But iOS went 6 years with skeumorphic icons (post-iPad, post-Retina) so mixed-dpi screens probably weren’t the only factor.
At that time iOS had the luxury that its higher-DPI variant was exactly twice the original resolution, so up- or downscaling of non-vector graphics worked well. (Similar for macOS.) Moreover, the original iPhone resolution was already relatively hi-DPI, meaning that accuracy on the individual pixel level wasn’t as important as on the typical 96-DPI desktop screen.
Yeah, but isn't text to image kinda the perfect tool for creating certain UI? The point of an icon is to compress/transform some idea/action/whatever into an image that communicates exactly what it does/what it represents. And often the thing you want an icon for isn't some concrete concept you can represent with 5 lines, but a label that language has converged on to describe a broad but fuzzy category of stuff.
Like, if you have an eCommerce store and you want an icon for mops, doesn't it kinda make sense to take your top 100 selling mops and blend them together into an icon?
Not really, because in this case, it’s better to just use the word “mops” and be done with it. You use icons when people are familiar with them. You do not invent them on a whim.
Stop letting graphics people decide these things by aesthetics. There is hard data from people that actually work in usability on how UIs ought to be built.
Yes, but those usability people have a tendency to design interfaces for the lowest common denominator. This often ends in disaster as the lowest common denominator often cannot even navigate a “usable” interface. Meanwhile, those who aren’t in that group feel almost infantilized.
I will take my extremely dense UI over an accessible interface that shows only 10 rows on a spreadsheet in 24 point font. Think of those with low vision!
> Yes, but those usability people have a tendency to design interfaces for the lowest common denominator. This often ends in disaster as the lowest common denominator often cannot even navigate a “usable” interface. Meanwhile, those who aren’t in that group feel almost infantilized.
I fully agree with you. But ...
> I will take my extremely dense UI over an accessible interface that shows only 10 rows on a spreadsheet in 24 point font. Think of those with low vision!
You will be Ctrl + FrontMouseScrollWheel to read your 3rd monitor too eventually.. be nice on HN.
> Meanwhile, those who aren’t in that group feel almost infantilized.
For me, the perfect examples of feeling infantilized (I like that word) are the following: I feel infantilized by government or hospital illustrations that are meant to convey a simple message to the lowest common denominator. I feel infantilized by Youtube videos and TV ads that use these happy but annoying 'toddler' sounds in the background.
I think it's inevitable (and fine) that aesthetic trends influence UIs, however, what is terrible (and already happening... again) is that people will create all kinds of faulty reasoning and justification as to why the new trend is empirically better UX when what likely is at play is a tiny bit of innovation and a lot of novelty.
IME, there could be a lot more clarity in product and UX if more people were honest with themselves and others about just wanting "better" looking UI.
Every day, there are so many comments complaining about the open-source/free software they tried being too old and the UI being stale. I never notice someone offering the example of their modern UI. "But the UI is terrible!" maybe graphic designers are needed.
This is nitpicking but Windows 10, while annoyingly buggy during development (they dropped their QA for windows insiders during that period), was a return back to sanity after Windows 8's UI.
flat, minimalist design has been a disaster for the human race
if designers need the AI hypetrain to bring back drop shadows and the basic usability affordances we had for the 30 years before they ruined things, so be it
As much as they were a disaster for computing interfaces what they did to architecture is so much worse and so expensive to fix. So many cities are semi-permanently scarred by outrageous creations of "starchitects".
Not a new thought but it always surprises me how much groupthink applies in these situations. Airbnb announced a new design and we’ve all just collectively accepted that it’s the future? …what?
I don’t hate the trend but I am underwhelmed. Just loaded up the Airbnb site and… it’s new icons. The actual UI I’m interacting with hasn’t changed a jot, though. Google’s Material UI stuff from a few days ago felt much more interesting.
I also get this weird sense that besides seemingly just having changed 4 icons, as far as I can tell, it really feels like they’re just dusting off three dimensional icons that existed back in around about the early aughts ?
I do agree with the article that before the iOS 7 flat design rush the barrier to entry for indie app developers was super high because it's damn hard to make the iOS <7 style look good. Flat is easy though. But with AI tools, the old style is suddenly available to lots of people again.
Aha, yes, it's a grand total of five icons (that I've managed to see so far) mixed in with a lot of flat icons. And they look ugly AF, it looks like a blast from the early 2000.
> Airbnb announced a new design and we’ve all just collectively accepted that it’s the future?
Don't overindex on one guy with a newsletter. My read on this article was this is someone trying to be the guy who called the next trend. He cites no evidence supporting the claim that it's the next trend, he's just trying to be the guy who puts a name to it so that he's an influencer if it does.
He also mentions how he's been designing icons in this style for decades, which should make a skeptical person wonder whether there might be some wishful thinking going on here.
What I can tell you for sure is that, as a professional designer, I have not received any memos mandating the use of this style of icons. I'll let you know when I do.
Sshhht corporate hasn't understood yet that designers are in a collective loop because otherwise they would do nothing most of the time.
Changing icons, making some buttons bigger and smaller again, introducing and removing some gradients, that's what keeps us busy because at most companies the products already have a design system when we started.
Well, personally it just looks like ancient NeXTstep/clones to me... I'm having flashbacks of that icon of a hand reaching out from a bullet hole whatever that was?
Anyway, I checked the Airbnb website and it really seems out-of-place on Android. Gives crappy iOS port vibes.
Gnome used to have very detailed 3d icons that looked great and were a bit outside the norm at the time when everyone were doing flat icons.
They moved away from it though because they were too expensive and hard for single developers to make, so third party icons stuck out like a sore thumb.
This is fueled more by nostalgia than usefulness. That game example is horrible. It draws attention to icons more than the content itself. Makes the whole experience fatiguing.
Surprised there aren't more comments about the game example. I found it so bad - takes up so much space, provides no value, color schemes all over the place, every "icon" had wildly different rotations/perspectives.
Was it a little fun? Sure? Maybe? It was cute for a moment or two. But "near production ready"?
As someone who grew up with Nesticle and ZSNES as a kid and now uses OpenEMU, the icons and visual flare are big reasons lots of people use specific emulators. ZSNES is still used by a lot of people because it's "comfy" despite the accuracy being poor.
Kids downloading emulators today and experiencing 40 year old consoles like the NES and 50 year old consoles like the Atari 2600 for the first time don't want an all text UI. They want a picture of that ancient hardware. It makes their experience feel more real. In contrast, Retroarch is that it's an emulator frontend designed that has no frills in its UI, and it's designed with a mindset that everything doesn't take up much space, everything provides value, and color schemes aren't all over the place, and there aren't really any icons. And because it's the ideal HN emulator, it's difficult to use and ugly.
Oh I’m not arguing for minimalism or all text uis - I agree with the article in the sense that modern uis are boring and we need something fresh. It just seems like a very shoddy example to run a victory lap with. Design is subjective, but I don’t think many people would see that and think “yes this looks finished / is the future”. Which seems to fly in the face of the article and the point of including it
Because race is a subdivision of a species when referring to humans, because humans like using unique terms for ourselves to differentiate between other animals. It is factually incorrect to say “human race” and seems to be an attempt to manipulate the language to manipulate people’s minds into believing the gaslighting that we are all the same and uniform profit units, like some corporate fever dream where all humans consume the same corporate slop uniformly across the globe.
Are you a human with unique cultures and identity or are you a unit that produces predictable profit like a slave that is simply defined as human in the HR records?
If you are the human race, why does corporate HR and corporate politics obsess about “diversity” and whether you check the ideal box to keep the “diversity” high so that there is no unifying identity to organize around to resist the abuses of the upper class?
You seem to be viewing this through a modern lens, and treating this like it's "new" terminology being used to gaslight people.
Some would say that the modern definition of "race" is what's not real, what is socially constructed. And that the "human race" is the only one with clear ties to biology.
"Human race" has never had anything to do with "racial identity" or "identity politics" or anything related to any of that. It has always just meant "human species" since the 1500s.
That is factually incorrect. The earliest record of the related use is from the 1560s when it meant “common ancestry; bred, family, lineage”. Later scientific organization simply formalized the implied, that it is a subunit and, arguably even, a sub-subunit of order along the lines of a regional ethnic group, e.g., Appalachians, Swabians, Basques, etc. …lineage, breed, family… for which no logical argument can be made that e.g., the Northern Europeans of various regional ethnicities who have high rates of Neanderthal DNA are the same as black Africans that have zero Neanderthal DNA but have even higher rates of DNA from an unknown species. We are quite literally, objectively different species, not just races, and that should be ok … we should be ok with that.
While this article is a little fluffy and overstated, I do share the overarching sentiment — UIs for the vast majority of products should be at least a little fun.
“Delightful” UI/UX has become a cliché at this point, but it really does make me happy to see an element of craft and intention in the software I use, and stuff like these detailed little icons accomplishes that well!
Aesthetics or fun needs to be secondary to usability. If making something "fun" comes at the cost of making the design less usable, it should be avoided.
Obviously companies need to define their own image in design, but that is not an excuse for bad design.
I'm unconvinced. The article cites Airbnb and "the internet" as evidence:
> After Airbnb showed off their redesign, the internet exploded with soft, dimensional, highly detailed icon sets prompted into existence using generative AI tools.
One company's redesign + random proofs of concept does not indicate a real trend, and the idea that LLMs make designing with dimensionality in mind more accessible is dubious.
Good design requires consistency. High dimensionality makes consistency harder to achieve. LLMs perform better when there are fewer design nuances to consider. Additionally, we can expect LLMs to reinforce existing trends, as they're all trained on what exists today.
How are we not full circle back to the early 00's with this design? It didn't really catch on then. Maybe this time? Wasn't a big fan of it then. Still not.
There are some other interesting dynamics in UX that aren't just cyclical trends:
- Natural language interfaces. You can now communicate with your computer with language, voice or text. There are some situations where this is an improvement, but others where it's not. It'll be interesting to see how interfaces are designed to combine the best of both worlds.
- Adaptive interfaces. The UI/UX of the last period of computing is largely a solved problem. There are standard UX solutions for most types of problems. It's also become significantly easier to build these interfaces, and LLMs are pretty good at writing basic declarative UIs. I think the bar will be raised such that users expect their interfaces to adapt to them, instead of a one-size-fits-all solution.
- Immersive interfaces. This might be similar to "dimensional" but more about the actual UX instead of just how 3D the buttons and icons are. I think using 3 dimensions is a natural solution for expressing higher information density. VR and AR will eventually catch on in some form.
I find it very interesting the praise Material Design Expressive gets. Perhaps it's just because I've always been on iOS, but every iteration of Material Design seems so much more foreign to me. I'm not really criticizing it, but personally I find it to be extremely confusing to visually process.
It feels a lot like language divergence. iOS and Android started at the same place (same language), then became different accents, different dialects, and (soon/now) different languages.
AirBnB's redesign isn't a indicator of design trends changing. Most of the app remains minimal and "flat", the dimensional flares are mixed inconsistently throughout. The app could more easily flop back to fully minimalist than it could into a fully 3d design language.
Also dimensional icons have existed within flat UIs as app icons for quite some time, though some platforms have had periods of both flat icons and UI. In a sense they are adopting them in this existing usage as sub-app icons.
The oddest thing is the glossy "new" tags, they are the only tags within the UI which are glossy. Having them mixed with flat tags and flat buttons is honestly confusing, they look more like buttons than the actual buttons do.
> Back in the early 2000s, UI design like this had a high skill ceiling. It took years to master lighting, materials, and depth. Now? That level of craft is often just a prompt away.
Mastering any design style takes time, and the skill ceiling is not meaningfully different if there even is one. I'm also highly sceptical that AI would be able to be consistent enough whether generating flat or 3d icons.
Yeah, the icon style is the part I care about the least when taking about flat design. It is the fact that it removes all visual affordances that something is interactive. Clickable items that don't look like buttons or hypertext, they just look like the rest of the page. Scrollable regions that don't have scrollbars or any other visual clue that there is more content below or to the right, unless some of that content happens to be cut off by the invisible region boundary. Windows whose only indication of which is selected is the title goes from dark gray on light gray, to medium gray on light gray.
I don't think it is 2D vs 3D, but rather 2D and 3D vs 4D which probably has these guys a little worried. The human interface is still the same but now instead of something that responds instantly or deterministically like the doorbell interface which has tactile input and auditory output, the output is automated actions in time. This is what the thinking output in LLM interface is. I don't know if the language and semantics allow me to say this but the LLM output is more than a 2D screen, it is also in time. That is the fundamental change.
This might not be different from say ... clicking a button causing a massive Rube Goldberg machine to take money out of my bank account, send emails about my booking to all interested parties with signals moving across continents before in some time in the future sending me a confirmation message when everything is finished. People are beginning to think in terms of the output of the action of pressing a button to book as automation instead of just output on a screen that says successful or failed attempt to book.
(If anyone from the Airbnb design team reads this, please, please, please, work on making sure that the absolute important information about a booking in text messages are visible in the text message. And that the page before booking does not hide information about the booking on an iPhone 13. You do not have control of the thousand different combinations of phones, operating systems, ect so when the information has be presented in only words it has to be done in a way that people understand them.)
nice. so basically we are so "back" to the icons i saw from my packard bell desktop shitty navigator OS like 30 years ago lol. everything is truly cyclical (also in fashion like what gen-z is wearing) and i'm old enough now i guess so it a little jarring to see these things playing out before my eyes.
292 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadYou know what comes after "dimensional" design? Radicial minimalism.
"Once you strip away everything extra, everything ornamental, what remains is the truth, and nothing more" There, I wrote a tagline for design trend of 2030.
Actually, the developer should really do some work in the UI thread beyond just sending out a "button pressed" message: When I press the button, I need immediate feedback that it was pressed and that pressing it had an effect, that things are now happening. Too many UIs, especially in the web where round-trip-times can be long, rely on just firing of a message or a network request. The response to the user, by displaying a spinner, progress bar, modal or new page only happens asynchronously and after a comparatively long delay. This means that users will sometimes repeatedly click because "nothing happens", leading to multiple messages, leading to multiple actions, leading to a big mess.
So the UI thread should synchronously trigger user feedback, take a lock or other measures to prevent unintended repeated actions and start a timeout callback in case the triggered action doesn't happen in a sensible timeframe.
About the return of skeuomorphism, I do believe it's happening because people are fed up with flat everything in two colors, but I wish there was less oscillation around the center. As many have mentioned, Win2k was very good, and it was a middle ground between the extremes we're seeing today. Actually, it was extreme in one way: you could tell what a UI element was going to do without trying to click every pixel and seeing what happens.
The UI back then was sometimes janky, but it was so much more useful. Icons were meaningful and easy to recognize despite the low resolution. Quite often interfaces were customizable, they were not afraid of users becoming power users. Peak UI for me was probably Winamp 2.
Nowadays it is just a bunch of flat glyphs, things hidden in hamburger menus, arcane submenus, etc. Probably done to increase "engagement" or whatever bullshit metric they want to minmax for.
For example, flat monochrome icons emerged, because previously the UI was massively overshadowing the main content [^1]. So we traded the recognizability of icons for a better overall hierarchy in the UI.
Now that this problem is solved, designers are looking to reintroduce recognizable icons without sacrificing the previous goals. In the AirBnB app, you’ll find that the busy icons are only used when they’re the main focus. Auxiliary icons remain flat.
[^1]: https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/fac...
Like, if you have an eCommerce store and you want an icon for mops, doesn't it kinda make sense to take your top 100 selling mops and blend them together into an icon?
I will take my extremely dense UI over an accessible interface that shows only 10 rows on a spreadsheet in 24 point font. Think of those with low vision!
I fully agree with you. But ...
> I will take my extremely dense UI over an accessible interface that shows only 10 rows on a spreadsheet in 24 point font. Think of those with low vision!
You will be Ctrl + FrontMouseScrollWheel to read your 3rd monitor too eventually.. be nice on HN.
I'm failing to parse this
For me, the perfect examples of feeling infantilized (I like that word) are the following: I feel infantilized by government or hospital illustrations that are meant to convey a simple message to the lowest common denominator. I feel infantilized by Youtube videos and TV ads that use these happy but annoying 'toddler' sounds in the background.
IME, there could be a lot more clarity in product and UX if more people were honest with themselves and others about just wanting "better" looking UI.
if designers need the AI hypetrain to bring back drop shadows and the basic usability affordances we had for the 30 years before they ruined things, so be it
I don’t hate the trend but I am underwhelmed. Just loaded up the Airbnb site and… it’s new icons. The actual UI I’m interacting with hasn’t changed a jot, though. Google’s Material UI stuff from a few days ago felt much more interesting.
I’m not convinced either.
Most of the stuff on HN isn’t exactly written by super geniuses, especially for blog posts without some kind of analysis.
I do agree with the article that before the iOS 7 flat design rush the barrier to entry for indie app developers was super high because it's damn hard to make the iOS <7 style look good. Flat is easy though. But with AI tools, the old style is suddenly available to lots of people again.
Don't overindex on one guy with a newsletter. My read on this article was this is someone trying to be the guy who called the next trend. He cites no evidence supporting the claim that it's the next trend, he's just trying to be the guy who puts a name to it so that he's an influencer if it does.
He also mentions how he's been designing icons in this style for decades, which should make a skeptical person wonder whether there might be some wishful thinking going on here.
What I can tell you for sure is that, as a professional designer, I have not received any memos mandating the use of this style of icons. I'll let you know when I do.
Don't undersell it. It also manages to run like ass on a desktop with a modern gaming GPU, and takes 5 years to load on a gigabit connection.
And got my location wrong. And decided to machine-translate everything away from my native language.
Changing icons, making some buttons bigger and smaller again, introducing and removing some gradients, that's what keeps us busy because at most companies the products already have a design system when we started.
Anyway, I checked the Airbnb website and it really seems out-of-place on Android. Gives crappy iOS port vibes.
They moved away from it though because they were too expensive and hard for single developers to make, so third party icons stuck out like a sore thumb.
Was it a little fun? Sure? Maybe? It was cute for a moment or two. But "near production ready"?
Kids downloading emulators today and experiencing 40 year old consoles like the NES and 50 year old consoles like the Atari 2600 for the first time don't want an all text UI. They want a picture of that ancient hardware. It makes their experience feel more real. In contrast, Retroarch is that it's an emulator frontend designed that has no frills in its UI, and it's designed with a mindset that everything doesn't take up much space, everything provides value, and color schemes aren't all over the place, and there aren't really any icons. And because it's the ideal HN emulator, it's difficult to use and ugly.
Are you a human with unique cultures and identity or are you a unit that produces predictable profit like a slave that is simply defined as human in the HR records?
If you are the human race, why does corporate HR and corporate politics obsess about “diversity” and whether you check the ideal box to keep the “diversity” high so that there is no unifying identity to organize around to resist the abuses of the upper class?
Some would say that the modern definition of "race" is what's not real, what is socially constructed. And that the "human race" is the only one with clear ties to biology.
"Human race" has never had anything to do with "racial identity" or "identity politics" or anything related to any of that. It has always just meant "human species" since the 1500s.
https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/ethics/Unabomber.pdf
“Delightful” UI/UX has become a cliché at this point, but it really does make me happy to see an element of craft and intention in the software I use, and stuff like these detailed little icons accomplishes that well!
> I treat AI as just that: a tool, not a shortcut to the final result—then there’s still a lot of room for craft, taste, and care.
I wholeheartedly agree with the author here.
Obviously companies need to define their own image in design, but that is not an excuse for bad design.
But that doesn’t mean we should lose sight of fun completely, which I think in many places we have!
> After Airbnb showed off their redesign, the internet exploded with soft, dimensional, highly detailed icon sets prompted into existence using generative AI tools.
One company's redesign + random proofs of concept does not indicate a real trend, and the idea that LLMs make designing with dimensionality in mind more accessible is dubious.
Good design requires consistency. High dimensionality makes consistency harder to achieve. LLMs perform better when there are fewer design nuances to consider. Additionally, we can expect LLMs to reinforce existing trends, as they're all trained on what exists today.
- Natural language interfaces. You can now communicate with your computer with language, voice or text. There are some situations where this is an improvement, but others where it's not. It'll be interesting to see how interfaces are designed to combine the best of both worlds.
- Adaptive interfaces. The UI/UX of the last period of computing is largely a solved problem. There are standard UX solutions for most types of problems. It's also become significantly easier to build these interfaces, and LLMs are pretty good at writing basic declarative UIs. I think the bar will be raised such that users expect their interfaces to adapt to them, instead of a one-size-fits-all solution.
- Immersive interfaces. This might be similar to "dimensional" but more about the actual UX instead of just how 3D the buttons and icons are. I think using 3 dimensions is a natural solution for expressing higher information density. VR and AR will eventually catch on in some form.
https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...
Bring me back to the era just after Geocities 1999. That pre-web 2.0 world saw some real futurism, before all the flatness took over.
Even Frutiger Aero was more forward thinking than Material.
It feels a lot like language divergence. iOS and Android started at the same place (same language), then became different accents, different dialects, and (soon/now) different languages.
Also dimensional icons have existed within flat UIs as app icons for quite some time, though some platforms have had periods of both flat icons and UI. In a sense they are adopting them in this existing usage as sub-app icons.
The oddest thing is the glossy "new" tags, they are the only tags within the UI which are glossy. Having them mixed with flat tags and flat buttons is honestly confusing, they look more like buttons than the actual buttons do.
> Back in the early 2000s, UI design like this had a high skill ceiling. It took years to master lighting, materials, and depth. Now? That level of craft is often just a prompt away.
Mastering any design style takes time, and the skill ceiling is not meaningfully different if there even is one. I'm also highly sceptical that AI would be able to be consistent enough whether generating flat or 3d icons.
This might not be different from say ... clicking a button causing a massive Rube Goldberg machine to take money out of my bank account, send emails about my booking to all interested parties with signals moving across continents before in some time in the future sending me a confirmation message when everything is finished. People are beginning to think in terms of the output of the action of pressing a button to book as automation instead of just output on a screen that says successful or failed attempt to book.
(If anyone from the Airbnb design team reads this, please, please, please, work on making sure that the absolute important information about a booking in text messages are visible in the text message. And that the page before booking does not hide information about the booking on an iPhone 13. You do not have control of the thousand different combinations of phones, operating systems, ect so when the information has be presented in only words it has to be done in a way that people understand them.)
On the theme, Zukitre it's flat but it has contrast.
It will do everything for you that you do now using the web ..we’ll be opening less apps and web browsers in a few years or less.
Here’s an inspiring one:
https://x.com/efortis/status/1879712687896289471