Comment by crimsonalucard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crimsonalucard | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The human capacity to read and decode symbols is only a recent cultural phenomenon within the great span of our anthropological history. Therefore our eyes have been naturally selected over eons to look at objects in the real world a lot longer then they have been selected to decode symbols. As a result, human eyes actually are better equipped to process shading, geometry and the complexity of physical objects better then it can process a symbol.

Flat design is suppose to be more efficient, however based on our evolutionary history, an all out flat design actually increases the effort the brain needs to go through to process symbols. But really, this achieved efficiency doesn't matter as the difference between flat and adding some shading is negligible. What matters is whether or not we perceive the design as attractive, and that is a purely cultural and subjective factor.

Flat design does have efficiency improvements but it's not where you think it is. The efficiency improvement is not on the user side, but for the developer. Anyone with the talent to make a cover photo, draw a flat square and paste some text on it can now call themselves a professional designer.

Zero talent + minimal effort = Clean Minimal Design.

Maybe I'm exaggerating on the amount of effort required but definitely you don't need the ability to paint like leonardo in order to make a minimal layout.

A good middlee between minimal and "realness" is material design, which plays off of what you are saying (the ease of the brain undrstanding layers and depth).

The amount of effort for good minimal design and good "classical" design is probably the same for people well versed in either. But in either case you still need to learn about it to make it look ok. Shoddy things have always looked shoddy, no matter how many gradients you slap on it.

Material design isn't a thing. It's Google's name for their design language, which is just flat design with more animations. It's not like there's a "school of material design" or a "theory of a material design." So I wouldn't suggest it as an alternative to flat / minimal design. It doesn't offer much of an alternative.

> Material design isn't a thing

Yes, it is.

> It's Google's name for their design language

Which is a thing.

> which is just flat design with more animations.

And depth, so not flat.

Design languages like Windows Modern (or whatever the design language that used to be called "Metro" is called now) and Material Design are more clear and specific things than "flat" or "skeumorphic" design, which are just descriptors of one aspect of the design approach

And, sure, most of them are evolutions of things that have gone previously and combine pre-existing elements without being revolutionary departures. But that doesn't make them not clear and specific things.

You're taking "isn't a thing" too literally. Yes, design languages are things. But material design is not a complete school of thought. It's one company's design language. Other companies are going to want their own design language, to distinguish themselves from their competitors. They can take inspiration from material design, but whatever you make can't be called material design. Google defines what material design is, and only they can put the material design stamp on something.

And even though material design adds some depth, it's still pretty flat. Sure, cards and panels have a slight drop shadow behind them, but buttons still lack any bevel or border. This isn't much different from current flat designs. Many of them include depth in select places.

> But material design is not a complete school of thought.

Yes, it is. Its actually more of a "complete school of thought" than, e.g., "flat design", which is a vague, ill-defined, poorly-bounded element of an approach to visual design, not a complete school of thought on UI design.

> Other companies are going to want their own design language, to distinguish themselves from their competitors.

Some may, some may not. Design language is hardly the only potential axis of product or company differentiation. Furthermore, you can differentiate on design within the parameters of a design language like Material Design, because -- while fairly comprehensive -- it doesn't dictate all aspects of design. Defining consistency in the areas Material Design leaves open produces a distinct design that is still completely within the bounds of the Material Design.

You're confusing complete with specific. The material design language offers specific solutions to specific cases. But what designers need more is a general theory they can apply to any situation. And the theory behind material design doesn't fundamentally differ from flat design, other than it's focus on animations. It still shares the principles espoused by flat design people (authentically digital interfaces, minimalism).

> You're confusing complete with specific.

No, I'm not, I'm saying design languages with well-defined motivating principles like Material Design and Microsoft's ex-Metro language are both more complete schools of thought on design (starting with identified principles that cover broader scope of design problems) and more specific, well-defined approaches to design/interaction (clearly defining both foundational principles and the applications of those to specific areas of design) than things like "flat" design.

A symbol is a symbol. A flat monochrome floppy disk icon represents the concept of saving a file just the same as a lovingly rendered 3D floppy disk or even a photograph would.

Text glyphs are very flat, abstract symbols that represent sounds or ideas (indeed, I'm pretty sure the whole "flat design" trend was inspired by typography in the first place). Sure, we've been hunting beasts for much longer than we've been reading and writing, but written language is still a very old invention in the human timescale. And art predates even that. Humanity has had plenty of experience with symbolic visuals over the ages, I think we're equipped well enough to use basic smartphone apps.

Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be.

Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.

Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen.

Modern minimalism only became fashionable a century or so ago, which was - coincidentally - around the time artists started experimenting with extreme abstraction.

Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too.

Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels.

It's a difference of metaphorical and literal depth. Ignoring scale-dependence robs content of weight.

So minimalism is literally shallow. It's aesthetic lossy compression - abstraction into illegibility, for the sake of abstraction.

You can get away with that in art if you have something interesting to say. But it's really not the best of all possible solutions for UI/UX.

>Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be.

>Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.

>Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen.

But you don't see the depth of the stroke or the texture of the paper when you're reading. You see abstract lines. You don't see the imperfect squiggles our meat-appendages create unless you really focus; at a glance, your brain autocorrects them into the intended strokes.

>Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too.

>Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels.

Uh, no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_font

>So minimalism is literally shallow.

"It seems that perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away." - Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Sure, we're well equipped to handle symbols, but we're better equipped to handle pictures. How much training does a toddler require to recognize the word "duck" versus a picture of an actual duck? I argue that you'd be comparing a time span of seconds to a time span of years.

But again, with training the efficiency in processing a symbol versus a picture becomes negligible. What matters is whether or not it looks good. Right now everyone likes flat design.

The only technical advantage flat design has over a more traditional approach is that it releaves a huge amount of burden from the designer. An icon of a floppy disc is way easier to draw then a 3d picture of a floppy. I would argue that flat design has allowed people with zero skill in traditional art to become "designers"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com