Comment by sgarland
7 days ago
Accessibility aside, I don't see the appeal in this design. I find the current design quite pleasant and usable. Translucent 3D text sounds like teenage-me messing around in Photoshop in the early 2000s.
7 days ago
Accessibility aside, I don't see the appeal in this design. I find the current design quite pleasant and usable. Translucent 3D text sounds like teenage-me messing around in Photoshop in the early 2000s.
The new glass design feels fresh and playful. Like a more refined luxury version of Frutiger Aero. The current design is functional, but it feels pretty stale and mundane after years.
That is actually a feature. An UI should never be, under any circumstances, in line with a trend, fresh or different for the sake of being different.
It should, however, be as invisible as possible. Being only functional is a compliment.
Huge disagreement here. Maybe true for something critical like the control board on some heavy machinery.
But for something like a phone or messaging app, I want to see the return of fun, creative, and unique. We had such a great era of design around 2006-2013 and then it all rapidly went incredibly dull since then.
I want to see creative menus back, I want to see whacky UIs like windows media player skins back. Ultimately for basic stuff of low importance like your phone, the most absolutely optimal UI doesn’t matter, much like I don’t care for the most absolutely optimal furniture. Its visual appeal matters.
6 replies →
It's Aqua 2.0, or at least, I hope it's going to be like that.
Apple know their customers and what they like.
I am actually Apple-phobic, a diehard linux user and incapable of doing simple tasks on Apple products. However, I think they have got a winner here. Although people talk of Vista Aero, it is more sophisticated than that, and, when this rolls out, Android will look distinctly old fashioned and low status, even if it is better as far as accessibility. I like what they have done here, even if it is not for me.
Disagree on almost all points. Glass and the relative absence of color, texture and patterns make it look cold, detached, almost inhuman and absent of anything your eyes could rest on. There are ways to make this approach look cool and futuristic, but it suffers from the same downside as a lot of the white/glassy modernist architecture: the human eye abhors lack of detail and natural/organic patterns and texture. (It makes for a great canvas for graffitti though...)
Meanwhile, Android's Material You/Expressive design language is taking almost an opposite approach. Personally, I prefer it to Liquid Glass by a wide margin.
Architecture without structural integrity is terrible no matter how it looks. User interfaces that aren't usable and clear are bad no matter how they look. Sure the human eye enjoys looking at trees with thousands of leaves, but you won't find a person who enjoys a UI with a thousand buttons on screen.
To me visual noise in user interfaces is a severe distraction and I tend to prefer applications with minimal UIs (not minimal features). I disabled text cursor blinking in the browser and use a program to auto-hide the mouse pointer after a few seconds because it can distract me from reading.
I do like this new UI Apple shows here, though I would probably get tired of the effects if I had to use it for extended periods of time. Just like animations look satisfying until you realize they slow down everything you do on the computer because often their main purpose is marketing and not usefulness.