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Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

This is a great example of how 2D UX design is going completely off the rails.

FlatUI is making it impossible to distinguish between buttons, tags, labels and tabs. Skeuomorphism, correctly derided in its cartoonish, Mac Calendar form, has come to mean having any depth in a UI. Sane-looking buttons? Skeuomorphic! Using an inset for an aside? Skeuomorphic! Icons? Skeuomorphic! Mouse pointer? Skeuomorphic!

It reminds me of the way the the Bauhaus guys would yell "Bourgeois!" at one another's designs until all they were left with were unlivable, white cubes:

http://www.tomwolfe.com/BauhausExcerpt.html

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We'll see. In the short run, most good design tends to overshoot a bit (remember the first iteration of Aqua?). I suspect we'll see some affordances come back -- on the whole iOS7 is mostly a step in a good direction (e.g. the indicator of an interactive widget vs. content in iOS7 is, pretty consistently, color -- I think it works well and eliminates a lot of cruft).

The idea of banishing icons is, however, kind of nutty. Icons serve both a practical and aesthetic role, and switching to fluid layers of words is going to both be aesthetically limiting and confusing.

No, what is aqua? As a non-designer who keeps an eye on design trends, I've honestly never heard of it.

OP is talking about what the OS X UI looked like in the early days [1]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)

In my understanding, buttons and tabs are skeuomorphs, no matter if they are rendered flat or pseudo-3D. In a true digital UI (e. g. CLI shell) there are no such things. I am not trying to say that we should get rid of buttons everywhere, my point is that making UI flat is not enough to make it non-skeuomorphic: it may be flat but still based on imitating real-world objects (now doing it badly).

Yeah, but if you keep going you could say the command line is skeuomorphic just by being text: it's the digital equivalent to typewritten text.

If you go further, you could say that the glyphs of the letters themselves are skeuomorphs, in the same way that icons are.

When it comes down to it, buttons are a simple and effective interface, regardless of whether or not they represent some physical or historical analog.

What's a "true" digital UI?

If you're going to say buttons and tabs are skeuomorphic, what isn't skeuomorphic? Interacting with a CLI resembles the back-and-forth query and response of conversational dialogue: it's skeuomorphic too!

Here's a question for you: what, exactly, is wrong with using metaphors for existing, well-known analogues to convey information in a new context? Isn't this how languages, notational conventions, and symbolic connotations naturally evolve among humans? I understand why people are tired of Apple's excess, but what's the problem with skeuomorphism per se?

Have I said anywhere that using metaphors is wrong? What is wrong is when a UI uses the button metaphor but avoids making buttons look like ones just to seem more "digital".

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