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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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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.
- 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.
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.
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.
Actually EVERYTHING looks like itβs made for a phoneβ¦
Most people don't use computers :(
I think the number of computer users stayed about the same, and the biggest Eternal September wave has seen at least 10x as many people getting online phone-only
I am a die hard laptop/desktop person but the majority of my outside of work 'computer' time is on my phone these days :(
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).
- Giant fucking (landing page img|carousel)s
- Cutesy (error msg|splash screen) illustrations
- Camera bumps . Wanna lay your phone flat ? Requires case now !
- This stupid fucking thing :
I despise giant image carousels on landing pages so much...
Especially when they frantically scroll through their images
Car centric cities by far. Bring back walkable neighborhoods and give me options to move around instead of only being able to be stuck inside a car
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Rounded corners. Everywhere. They lose so much space, especially on small screens, and everything feels crammed.
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No personalization anywhere. You used to be able to completely customize social media profiles, to the point of editing your page's CSS directly.
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Modern OSes (except linux or BSD based ones which are not android) also have no color or personalization. You usually have the slabs of white on light mode, or the slabs of blak on dark mode, with only one color you can choose for some details.
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JavaScript animations on every. Single. Website. I have an old phone (because I don't like modern stuff), and it struggles with almost every modern, animated site. Is it really necessary to add all that js and animations?
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No headphone jacks or expandable storage on modern phones. It probably costs cents to add those features. I know phones don't usually have expandable storage because it makes you buy a new one once you fill all your storage, and I know they don't have audio jacks because it makes you buy the company's wireless headphones, but I need those features in my phone.
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Why does everything have to be a web app now? Have people forgotten about actual softwate, that you own, that doesn't need internet to work, that uses almost no resources and is faster and has more features than a web app? We got everything backward. Sites that should be webs like reddit will ask you to download their apps, while microsoft will try to code Word in javascript and sell it to you as an "upgrade".
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I hate subscriptions with passion, especially for software.
There's so much javascript everywhere... A few years ago I used to be able to browse the internet with the NoScript extension, and it only required a few allows now and then. Now NOTHING works without javascript, and each website needs you to allow 20 others websites for it to work...
I've tried COSMIC DE Beta on Pop!_OS on an older laptop I have around, and the feature I'm looking forward to most, that I've seen and experienced from my mininal usage of it, is the ability to easily change colours from settings. Not just accent colours, but window colours, text colours, etc. From what I recall, I could, for instance, recreate Hot Dog Stand, the Windows 3.1 colour theme, right from the system settings app, no third party downloads
Everything in cars being replaced by screens. If auto manufacturers could figure out how to make the steering wheel a screen, they would. Impossible to work on those things.
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.
FUCKING MATERIAL DESIGN AND ALL IT'S RELATIVES!
FUCK YOU, WHOEVER DESIGNED THIS SHIT.
I don't mind that someone designed it, but the people who decided that it would the new standard and the ONLY standard design should be shot. In the legs. And left to bleed out on a raft above a shark tank.
Thank you! this mental image was like cold balm on my soul.
I shall cherish it. :)
Didn't like material design prior to Material 3 very much
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...
Smart everything. Iβm buying second hand TVs simply so they are not marketing to me as soon as I turn it on.
Terms of design I feel like since postmodern we have had a bastardisation of flat design which was really mostly suited to information design but it got shoved on everything hence the monochrome blandness. On the other side we got a bastardisation of arts and crafts maybe where people tried to digitally replicate traditional methods, we got hand lettering stamping etc. then they swished them together and true design got shoved out the window in favour of ,
how can we grab the users attention, to
how can we hold the viewer captive, to
How can we force the viewer to absorb, to
The how can we annoy the viewer so much they will pay to just read/view in peace.
I am not sure what this design movement will be called
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.
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 π
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Webpages bouncing stuff around as various elements load in.
Back in the day, the space would be reserved, so if something hadn't loaded yet, that space would be blank.
Nowadays, you'll be reading something (or worse -- trying to click on something), and it'll get bounced around because some other element of the webpage got loaded in.
those stupid lazy selection lists that seem to load asynchronously. items show up late to the party and are allowed to actually cut in line, shuffling the order of the existing (clickable) items below. how did those ever get approved?
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The trend toward subdued color palettes. Every new home is decorated in "millennial gray." Most cars are black, white, gray, or silver. You have to go out of your way to find bright, colorful clothing or furniture. It's incredibly boring and I can't wait for the pendulum to swing back the other way.
that's one of the reasons I specifically picked a bright lime green for my car
I really thought weβd have a vibrant post pandemic βroaring 2020βsβ. Seems like it wasnβt handled right and so weβre sort of still stuck in the same doldrums.
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PC towers that light up like a warehouse rave. I don't need to signal to Rohan that my house calls for aid. It's why I've stuck with a Fractal Design for the past 7 years.
The fancy light bullshit should be add-ons for people who want it, not baked in for everyone who don't. And you just know they're slapping a 200% premium on those shitty lights into the cost of the tower.
Hey I have that same case. It's so beautiful compared to rainbow vomit.
Tbf when they first came around I was into them but that was over 10 years ago. Can we please all just move on from these. Please
I'm on Linux which isn't able to control the RGB lighting so it's rainbows forever.
I was looking at pc parts recently and not only was there RGB towers... but also RGB CPU. And RGB GPU. And RGB RAM. And RGB fan. RGB pretty much everything... I guess now your computer can double as disco ball should the need arise
- 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 βhow is this even allowed on the streetβ kind of big and its so annoying. if i got hit by one of those i would probably die immediately π
- 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(TM)"...
Interrupted garden paths. Like stepping stones in lawn. Just put a continual path. Stepping stones are terrible for access and maintenance. Just grass or just paving would be preferable.
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