Comment by amyjess
10 years ago
Thank you! I knew there had to be somebody else who can't stand flat design!
IMO, pseudo-3D appearances like Windows 95, NeXTStep, Mac OS 8, and early KDE/GNOME were the pinnacle of aesthetic GUI design (and Windows 95 in particular is the pinnacle of UX as a whole), and everything since then has been a step backward.
I think about the only GUI aesthetic I can stand that's come out of the 21st century has been the use of transparent glass on some elements, and that fad has already died off, sadly. I have my KDE configured to look like a Windows 95-ish design (i.e. pseudo-3D and gray) for most things, but render a small handful of other things with glass, and it works pretty well for me.
There are plenty of us :-).
While I do hope that this is "just a phase", I don't think it will pass too quickly. The one thing that flat design excels at is quickly and cheaply creating "compliant" UIs and associated elements.
A former colleague of mine sketched the situation bitterly over a few beers; ten years ago or so, he'd spend days, sometimes even a week on an OS X application's icon. It was exhausting and it was hard to convince clients to pay him a week's worth of hourly fee for a damn icon. Nowadays (well, nowadays was about two years ago, I think), he could have two or three mockups ready in an evening and the hip entrepreneurs he worked for on the side would fall off their chairs gasping at how "clean" and "intrinsically meaningful" those blobs of colour were.
We joked around that a lot of the activity could be automated by just writing clever software that takes a 3D picture or a good enough photo of something and makes a "flat" version of it, requiring only a little intervention on a vectorized version to get something final-ish. Voila, icon "design" as a service.