So what are some good examples of recent non-minimalist design?
For example, I play Factorio quite a bit now, and the UX is a pleasure. The graphic design itself plays only a small role in that, but all the traditional elements, like buttons easy to recognize, ability to have hotkeys, tooltips, highlights, etc. are there.
Is that minimal, or info-abundant?
You can learn a lot about wasps from the pictures I take of them, but the giant triptych of a hunting P. metricus forager that spans one wall of my living room doesn't convey the same meaning that a series of illustrations in an entomology textbook would.
There's a concept of perceptual qualia-density which has nothing to do with semantic density in the linguistic/narrative sense.
In that sense, I think my photos and the textbook illustrations must be even more different than I already considered them to be. The illustrations deliberately don't capture the qualia that elicited them; they are intentionally abstract, sacrificing most detail in order by contrast to highlight the specific aspects considered most useful to the student of whatever specific topic they illustrate. They're information-dense in that sense, but not in the one under discussion here. My photos [1] are just the opposite; not only are they not abstracted, I've put a fair amount of work into editing them - cropping, white balance, contrast, saturation, sharpening, fine HSL adjustment per-channel - precisely with the intent that they should represent as accurately as possible, not the assorted energies of photons which impinged on the camera's sensor and were sampled over the course of 4ms or however long, but what I saw as I watched a hunting animal and her prey through a machine which both magnified them considerably and (by dint of a rubber eye cup) blocked out all other light. Which, if I understand the philosophical concept correctly, makes the photos in that sense by far the richer in informational content of the two examples.
It might, anyway. There is a good deal that those photos don't capture, like the bright heat of the blazing June day on which I took them - the darkness of the backgrounds is an artifact of technique, rather than a true representation of the scene. Or, beyond that, the mix of lingering fear and burgeoning fascination I felt as I took the shots, with the lens objective six inches from the subjects, and their sisters and fellow foragers buzzing about my head and not minding me at all - it was in fact during the taking of these shots that I lost my previously lively fear of wasps, this change occasioned in part by the camera itself and the sense of emotional distance its presentation of images can impose upon its user. In this case, it was that distance - that sense that, whatever I saw through the machine, it did not involve me as it would if seen with bare eyes - that enabled me to approach in spite of fear, eventually close enough to take these shots and in so doing first recognize the beauty both of the hunting animals themselves, and of the singleminded, innocent ruthlessness with which they stalk, pursue, capture, and dispose of prey. When after a while I noticed I was in the middle of a small eccentric cloud of paper wasps, none of whom gave any sign even of noticing my presence save as a static obstacle to be avoided in flight, the last of my fear of wasps evaporated, and I haven't felt it again since. I think that more than anything else was what moved me to make of those raw images what I have, but I don't know how much that experience constitutes of their informational content, or how much that determination is even mine to make.
Ryoji Ikeda arguably uses "information" in his art pieces, but it's not like it is presented in a useful manner.
The point I was making was something can be dense but minimal, because to me, minimal is "systems" question. I chose an artist as an example, but perhaps that complicates the point because the artist's primary concern is not utility.
>Ikeda arguably uses "information" in his art pieces, but it's not like it is presented in a useful manner
Here's where interpreting Ikeda gets kinda fun. By the way, he very intentionally does not care about meaning. He wants us to decide. Most of his work is driven by real data sets, like human genome, CERN super collider data, digits of mathematical constants, every part from a Honda Civic, position of stars in the universe.
For non-experts, I think he uncovers the vastness of many systems that are difficult to visualize, allowing people to "experience" the efforts behind, e.g. encoding the human genome.
Of course, it's not useful in the sense of a tool or utility, but you might walk away with a new perspective on science, engineering, mathematics, that before was totally opaque to most people.
Good luck reading any of that.
Setting your font size to 9px or whatever is not how you increase information density.
That's just bad usability.
Or for something newer, Post-Modernism.