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Comment by rickcarlino

15 hours ago

Are westerners entering a period of “minimalism fatigue”? Anecdotally it seems like color and texture are slowly taking hold in designs, especially in works targeting a younger demographic.

Example: liquid glass, anything published by Taco Bell, the meme of making sites look like they came from Geocities in 99, etc...

I hope so. I never bought into the minimalism/flat design hype and have lamented its loss ever since.

What’s worse is it bled out of the digital world and into the physical. There’s a real lack of color in our modern world, at least over here in the US. Everything is so neutral and boring, all in the name of efficiency.

  • And while they are at it, I hope they give us our scrollbars back. They seem to shrink by one pixel every year...

  • Minimalism does have its merits though. When decorating my apartment I looked for ways to use color without making whole thing look like confetti poop.

    • Yeah I'll agree there, as the saying goes "all things in moderation." It's when it goes too far is when it starts to suck the life and human-ness out of everything.

      I suppose my issue is more with the "corporate minimalism" trend rather than minimalist design in general.

      1 reply →

I hope so. I fancy myself pretty decent at reading. I see the Japanese sites and marvel at the amount of information they have available at a glance. I’m so sick of having to scroll 5 page lengths on western sites just to get to any meaningful information.

I'd say more of a rejection of a certain kind of millennial Instagram scented candle branding minimalism.

I know I certainly am. I hope we move towards things having colors other than white and black again. Please give me back grey backgrounds, I don't like the blinding whites everything has but dark mode is horrid when you aren't in a dark-ish environment

Hopefully. Everyone copied Apple without pausing to consider; "hey, does this make things _less_ usable?". Hint: yes, yes it does.

  • And now they're following Apple into maximalism again making it even less usable. As someone who did accessibility, minimalism did make it easier, it's hard to do maximalism right, one needs to use component extension and extensive styling rules for overlaps and bounding boxes versus a simple vector rectangle with revolved corners. I do miss the 2000s steel/gradient/font/faux 3d icewm-ish looks, they were pretty easy to pull off and didn't really hinder usability