Comment by mbrock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbrock | Hacker News Reader

There's a kind of fetish in design for modernism, futurism, and this kind of "sleek commercial humanism" (someone coin a better phrase).

The cliché is a self-taught designer in a minimalist loft in some gentrified inner city, drinking espresso from an expensive vintage machine, obsessively cleaning their wooden slab desk, listening to post-techno or whatever...

...making designs that look like they signify design... with some new or rediscovered modernist sans serif font... matching pastel colors... tasteful transitions... high-resolution photographs that signify urban creative prosumerism...

It's a kind of functional tradition, but as a whiny outsider I'm really getting sick of it. So I like this article because it's just highlighting that there are other values to aspire for, not just these matte white ideals of OCD modernism.

Reminds me of a video from some old RubyConf, I think, after a presentation about how "beauty corresponds to quality", some humanist in the audience asked a thoughtful question like "the type of beauty you've explained seems mostly like a classical or modernist ideal; what about stuff like postmodern notions of beauty, could that be relevant too?"

(Ruby itself is ugly and messy, a weird mix of Perl and Smalltalk... Hacker News is ugly and messy... even the interfaces polished to look simple and clean turn out to be ugly and messy when you look closer, so maybe part of it is just about honesty.)

The minimalism in the examples is a brand statement and a form of social signalling.

It's UX - in the marketing sense - rather than UI. And yes, a lot of web marketing assumes the buyer is exactly the kind of person you're suggesting - maybe because often they are.

Craigslist, Plenty of Fish, and all the other "Can't be bothered to add styling" sites are taking the opposite approach.

The lack of overt social signalling becomes an inclusive social signal of its own. By making the design as functional as possible and not aiming for any demographic, they're more likely to create something that's acceptably styled and useful for all of them.

Trained designers don't seem to understand this, because although they pay lip service to the idea of usability, they're mostly only interested in designs that include aesthetic signalling.

In fact there's a whole tradition of professional 'get shit done" design in hardware and software which gives users all the options they need at the same time with minimal fuss. This kind of flat design can be very productive, but it rarely looks pretty.

Tangentially, I think FB has the worst of all worlds. The aesthetic choices are poor. The ergonomics are poor. Critical settings are hidden. Content appears more or less randomly. You have limited control over what you get.

FB is only popular because of network effects. If the design was less dictatorial, it would be more popular still.

Trained designers don't seem to understand this, because although they pay lip service to the idea of usability, they're mostly only interested in designs that include aesthetic signalling.

This is a very common human pattern: Confusing signalling+lip-service around a complicated and subtle issue with genuine understanding. I suspect it's a common pattern because it's a part of the learning process.

Ruby might be messy, but I disagree entirely that it's ugly. It's one of the most enjoyable and human programming languages I've ever used, and is what I work in daily with much enjoyment and satisfaction.

I was in love with Ruby since way before Rails, and I still see the sparkle in its syntax. It's a strange kind of beauty, but beauty is weird. A horse can be ugly and beautiful at the same time...

Agreed, it's still a multiple more expressive than the other languages I use daily

How do you define expressiveness quantitatively?

As in, my Ruby code generally has the least amount of implementation cruft compared to other languages. It would seem that it fits closest to how I think.

Hashtables, resource locking, regular expressions, string formatting, are all things I have to deal with a lot and I like dealing with them in Ruby more than any other language. Also, reflection in Ruby is superb.

The old https://rubygems.org used to include the steps to build a gem, and publish it[0], which was helpful.

But in their redesign they removed it, so now that info is hidden behind two clicks (Guides -> Publishing your gem), but that page isn't near as concise, and doesn't show you how to build the package.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20140311091639/http://rubygems.o...

As a whole, pragmatism has apparently been discarded for the merits of a contemporary aesthetic fad.

I fear that it's perverted the discipline of design. Gone are the analytical days of Jeff Raskin and Donald Norman and I see it everywhere.

Systems and user interfaces are degrading and the trajectory appears aligned for more of the same.

I've found it to be more of a cycle. The current trend in systems and interfaces is minimal with people taking it too far. It will swing back to more comprehensive interfaces (ui, api, etc) when people get tired of not having anything and comprehensive will be back. The downside is that comprehensive interfaces will be taken too far (eg: the 1 api call to rule them all) and then people will introduce minimal again.

Good system/interface design is rare, and good design works well regardless of the current trend.

Do you also have this feeling when you use some web page, and the someone decides to do UI refurbish, that many times, it will look better but the feeling when you actually use it become worse? I'm not talking about simply becoming used to the old, and resisting new. It's rather that many times in the first version of the UI, many things become clear once you see it, but making it more aesthetic means many times to hide or obscure some otherwise natural or common actions.

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