I don’t hate the trend but I am underwhelmed. Just loaded up the Airbnb site and… it’s new icons. The actual UI I’m interacting with hasn’t changed a jot, though. Google’s Material UI stuff from a few days ago felt much more interesting.
Don't overindex on one guy with a newsletter. My read on this article was this is someone trying to be the guy who called the next trend. He cites no evidence supporting the claim that it's the next trend, he's just trying to be the guy who puts a name to it so that he's an influencer if it does.
He also mentions how he's been designing icons in this style for decades, which should make a skeptical person wonder whether there might be some wishful thinking going on here.
What I can tell you for sure is that, as a professional designer, I have not received any memos mandating the use of this style of icons. I'll let you know when I do.
Don't undersell it. It also manages to run like ass on a desktop with a modern gaming GPU, and takes 5 years to load on a gigabit connection.
And got my location wrong. And decided to machine-translate everything away from my native language.
Changing icons, making some buttons bigger and smaller again, introducing and removing some gradients, that's what keeps us busy because at most companies the products already have a design system when we started.
They moved away from it though because they were too expensive and hard for single developers to make, so third party icons stuck out like a sore thumb.
Anyway, I checked the Airbnb website and it really seems out-of-place on Android. Gives crappy iOS port vibes.
I’m not convinced either.
Most of the stuff on HN isn’t exactly written by super geniuses, especially for blog posts without some kind of analysis.
I do agree with the article that before the iOS 7 flat design rush the barrier to entry for indie app developers was super high because it's damn hard to make the iOS <7 style look good. Flat is easy though. But with AI tools, the old style is suddenly available to lots of people again.