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Comment by conradev | Hacker News Reader

I enjoy reading pieces like this because I try to imagine myself as the antagonist – the evil designer who is intentionally trying to remove depth and make color contrast worse

The antagonist doesn't exist. What this post is lacking is any sort of coherent theory on why we created and deployed the uniformly "worse" designs over the last decade since iOS 7[1]. Someone thought it was a good idea. Actually, it is a rather large number of people. Why do we have the design we do?

[1] People like to use mark as a "turning point"

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I think because it's easier. The skeuomorphic designs take thinking, actual design work. The flat UI elements essentially design themselves. Of course designers are going to gravitate towards having to do less and having to think about it carefully. That's work. People hate work, and it opens you up to criticism. If you do the same as everybody else you're relatively insulated from criticism.

Flat UI is mostly crap, but it's going to take a lot of people complaining a lot more vehemently to get anything to change.

Consider that prior to “flat UI” we had that glossy highlight look on almost everything which definitely hampered readability: the Windows 7 Win32 default menubar tops my Hall of Shame just for how inescapable it was (e.g. turning off Aero Glass didn’t affect menubar styles)

Anyway, I’m still sticking with flat-ish, minimal UI - the leather look in iOS notes was a cute gimmick, but it gets old and would require retexturing in every release to stay fresh - no doubt Apple didn’t want to have to do that every year until iOS ceases being relevant.

I remember another article that we moved away from skewmorphic design patterns because people understand that the things that the UI lives on a touchscreen and many of the cues for skewmorphic design aren't needed. Still some remain like for example settings are a set of gears.

Before large screen smartphones people had to be trained on how to use it and skewmorphic design made more sense. What is needed though is visual cues though that work with flat design. Cards for example that can be swiped right or left. Turning up contrast can be changed by going into the accessibility part of settings but it seems like many accessibility features should be more apparent to more users because of its utility to a larger set of users.

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