Corporate whimsy. I forget what the name coined for it was. It has bubbly oddly proportioned people and pastel colors. As an example.
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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you're not complaining about "design trends", you're complaining about capitalism.
everything is touchscreen because it's cheaper than mechanical buttons.
all products looks the same because 1. it's cheaper 2. mass appeal is more profitable than niche, and 3. it's risk free
everything's an app because they can collect data, push notifications, and force you into closed ecosystems.
laptops are thin because they probably sell more as a lot of people prioritize lightweight and less bulky laptops to carry them around easier. phones are going the other way but when you're talking laptops it's kilograms rather than grams so the difference is more important.
finally rounded corners are probably a design trend, although i am generally in favor of them.
- Light and dark modes with nothing in between. Platinum from MacOS and the default look from Windows 95 were crisp and bright without burning out your eyeballs.
- Wasted screen space. People laugh at Japanese websites for looking too busy, but I'd much rather deal with that than scroll for ages or look for links buried 3 levels deep in a hamburger menu.
- The idea that everything needs a backlit color LCD screen.
- Modern standby on laptops. Sure I could just hibernate it, but that's very inelegant when S3 sleep was perfectly fine before.
- Glued-together electronics.
The ultra-dark dark modes really bug me, black with various shades of black or dark colors is almost impossible to see UI elements on easily.
Dark modes should be like in the 50% gray area, where it's dim but things can still have good contrast.
Out of curiosity, what is the difference between older S3 sleep and modern sleep?
Modern sleep keeps a network connection active so it can still check your email or whatever stupid reason they came up with.
S3 sleep powers down all major components except for RAM. Modern sleep also keeps the CPU and network up, albeit in a low power state. It's not always executed well, hence the reports of laptops cooking themselves in a bag or draining overnight despite being "in sleep mode".
Also doesn't hibernate write your RAM contents to your disk? That sounds like a great way to leak your passwords and encryption keys in plaintext. Also you need to always reserve the same amount of space on disk as your RAM and can't use that space for anything else on the off chance you might want to hibernate.
At least for windows the hibernation file is stored as a file on the C: drive, so will be encrypted by bitlocker along with your other data.
Wouldn't that also mean that when the file gets overwritten, i.e the next time the system hibernates, you can potentially run a data recovery program on the C filesystem to leak its previous contents since modern filesystems don't necessarily immediately overwrite the underlying data anymore, but usually just change the regions on the drive the file points to? So you could have ghost memory dumps hiding out in your free space just waiting for malware to access. You can definitely recover data from the free space of a Bitlocker volume because the encryption is transparent to the filesystem.
This is also why I don't like swap files and always disable them (or use an OS like Fedora that doesn't have them by default), because it kind of defeats the point of only storing some data in RAM for security.
I could just be ignorant of how memory files in storage are managed though.
Ah, that's exactly what mine does sometimes.
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Colors. House color options are stupid as shit. Especially if you're selling. Car color options. Why is everything so boring? Where's the teal and hot pink, and yellow with red stripes, amd rainbow, and glittery purple, and burnt orange and...
All houses are mostly beige-y white, or soft dark colors or something boring. All cars are black, white, or boring shades of blue, maybe red. No interesting shades. And then the inside of the car is like beige.
Meanwhile electronics, especially computer parts have too many fucking lights that are distracting as shit.
Webpages bouncing stuff around as various elements load in.
Back in the day, the space would be reserved, so if something hadn't loaded yet, that space would be blank.
Nowadays, you'll be reading something (or worse -- trying to click on something), and it'll get bounced around because some other element of the webpage got loaded in.
Thereβs a special place in hell for CSS flexboxes
This trend is, incidentally, solely because we a higher percentage of programmers knew what they were doing.
It's easier to build a webpage, but more people can make them worse quality, now.
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Rounded corners. Everywhere. They lose so much space, especially on small screens, and everything feels crammed.
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No personalization anywhere. You used to be able to completely customize social media profiles, to the point of editing your page's CSS directly.
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Modern OSes (except linux or BSD based ones which are not android) also have no color or personalization. You usually have the slabs of white on light mode, or the slabs of blak on dark mode, with only one color you can choose for some details.
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JavaScript animations on every. Single. Website. I have an old phone (because I don't like modern stuff), and it struggles with almost every modern, animated site. Is it really necessary to add all that js and animations?
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No headphone jacks or expandable storage on modern phones. It probably costs cents to add those features. I know phones don't usually have expandable storage because it makes you buy a new one once you fill all your storage, and I know they don't have audio jacks because it makes you buy the company's wireless headphones, but I need those features in my phone.
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Why does everything have to be a web app now? Have people forgotten about actual softwate, that you own, that doesn't need internet to work, that uses almost no resources and is faster and has more features than a web app? We got everything backward. Sites that should be webs like reddit will ask you to download their apps, while microsoft will try to code Word in javascript and sell it to you as an "upgrade".
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I hate subscriptions with passion, especially for software.
There's so much javascript everywhere... A few years ago I used to be able to browse the internet with the NoScript extension, and it only required a few allows now and then. Now NOTHING works without javascript, and each website needs you to allow 20 others websites for it to work...
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The trend toward subdued color palettes. Every new home is decorated in "millennial gray." Most cars are black, white, gray, or silver. You have to go out of your way to find bright, colorful clothing or furniture. It's incredibly boring and I can't wait for the pendulum to swing back the other way.
Don't worry, it will. I'm a designer and the one thing you can count is all of us designers get bored every few years and flip things around. That's how buttons keep shifting from rounded corners to square corners every few years.
I hate that. I had my home built to spec a few years ago. The exterior siding is cedar shake stained a chocolatey brown with forest green trim, and the interior is white walls but with natural wood trim, pale golden laminate wood flooring, and two tone hickory wood cabinets, and the interior doors are all just natural wood unpainted.
Iβve leaned into the wood aesthetic with my DIY standing desk and custom pine desktop stained a dark red oak color, among various other earth tone color hints, and splashes of brighter decoration here and there.
Was going for βcozy cabin/cottageβ and I think we nailed it. Itβs very rustic.
I really hate the modern trends of white, black, steel, and glass.
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Touch screens on fitness watches is the dumbest shit. I straight up can't use it while jogging and sweating. I just need a couple real buttons, but good luck finding that.
Car centric cities by far. Bring back walkable neighborhoods and give me options to move around instead of only being able to be stuck inside a car
- All new cars look the same and are way bigger than necessary
slightly related but every time i see one of those pickup trucks i am reminded of just how big they are, like βhow is this even allowed on the streetβ kind of big and its so annoying. if i got hit by one of those i would probably die immediately π
The advantage of an app is that they can use more permissions etc to spy on you even more compared to your browser.
And don't forget the biggest plus; they can also sell your data! Isn't that wonderful?
Also you can't force an app to close for real and not access the internet to do heaven knows what, unless you install specific apps to force close them and control them, which most people won't do since they don't even realize that an app is not really closed when they close it...
Big phones. Why wont they produce anything that fits in one hand anymore?
For me it's big phones being the most featureful phones.
Gimme a small phone with the camera array of the Galaxy Ultra and my wallet it yours
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I loath the modern obsession with minimalist, utilitarian design. Everything is just a white, black, or grey slab with no artistic thought put into its form. Buildings, homes, cars, clothes, electronic devices. It's almost like a capitalist version of brutalism. Even the design of user interfaces is usually a pile of flat, washed out rectangles now. It's like the soul has been sucked out of everything we make, reduced to it's most basic form. It can feel anti-human at times. Like the world has collectively decided that beauty is a waste of time.
- Giant fucking (landing page img|carousel)s
- Cutesy (error msg|splash screen) illustrations
- Camera bumps . Wanna lay your phone flat ? Requires case now !
- This stupid fucking thing :
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- Completely flat chiclet keyboards on laptops. It drives me absolutely insane because I can barely tell if my fingers are aligned with the keys. Thanks, Apple!
- Hidden controls on desktop software or desktop websites (ex: hidden exit, forward, and back controls on picture galleries)
- Hiding or collapsing scrollbars on desktop software
In general, it seems like there's a major trend in design of form beating the heck out of function. It looks pretty! Who cares if you can actually use it or not?
I'd argue it's less "It looks pretty" as "It looks modern(TM)"...
You definitely have a good point!
Everything you said.
Programs > apps (in the sense of the word)
Everything looks nearly identical online
Stupid delayed popups right where you're about to click
Websites making ANY chime/beep/noise in an attempt to direct you to their garbage robot support
Robot support
No companies having phones anymore..zero accountability.
Everything being forced to some social media garbage to tell a company how their service/product is broken and you need help
Right the robot support... Especially when the only way to reach support on a website is to go through the annoying support chatbot first... and it's designed intentionally this way to increase the chances of you just giving up π‘
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Actually EVERYTHING looks like itβs made for a phoneβ¦
Most people don't use computers :(
I think the number of computer users stayed about the same, and the biggest Eternal September wave has seen at least 10x as many people getting online phone-only
I am a die hard laptop/desktop person but the majority of my outside of work 'computer' time is on my phone these days :(
Modern construction on a budget. It uses little more than reinforced cardboard and a moisture barrier. Sometimes the cardboard isn't even glued or nailed in. So it can literally get unfolded by the wind, and suddenly the only thing preventing your house from getting water damage is a .3mm piece of plastic wrap that you HOPE the contractors didn't damage or install improperly.
Here's one such house. I don't know if it would even last a decade without significant repairs. They voided the warranty on the roof already too, so you could be out tens of thousands of dollars before you even move in.
I'm a graphic designer, so maximalism and antidesign. It's taking a bit to become more than just a trend, but it's getting there. I understand minimalism is getting stale, but the answer is not going for something hard to read. Even with proper hierarchy the sheer clash of colors, sizes, etc., will lead to a jumbled mess. Form follows function to make life easier.
A balance must be struck between maximalism and minimalism.
Minimalist web design is making me miss the mess that was the old internet. The terrible designs with dozen of bright elements all assaulting your eyes, the blinking stuff everywhere giving you seizures, the ugly animated GIFs whose pixels you could count, the absence of any coherence for colors and text formatting... It was awful, but at least it was interestingly awful. Each website had it's own unique flavor of awful. Now it's convenient, but it's all the same flavor of boring and bland convenience.
I see your point, but... I don't know. Nowadays, attention is a prime commodity. The easier something is to consume, the more people it will reach. And while that doesn't matter as much in entertainment media, it has to be considered when designing for more important topics. Thus, media has to be designed to be read efficiently.
I don't love how media is designed nowadays, precisely because it is monotonous and boring often, but I don't long for the days when I had to look an entire page over for the bit of information I'm after. A balance can be struck through clear layout design and following trends that respect hierarchy. Maximalism does neither.
Though, I feel like I have to differentiate artistic media from informative media. Art can go bonkers, in fact art should challenge established tropes, but design should prioritize function over form, keeping in mind there is some room for aesthetics in there.
Again, I'm approaching this from an efficiency and ease of use point of view.
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UI elements that expand and cover up other UI elements when you mouse over them.
"Flat" color schemes where you can't even tell where one UI element ends and the other begins.
Infinite scroll instead of pagination.
Smart everything. Iβm buying second hand TVs simply so they are not marketing to me as soon as I turn it on.
Terms of design I feel like since postmodern we have had a bastardisation of flat design which was really mostly suited to information design but it got shoved on everything hence the monochrome blandness. On the other side we got a bastardisation of arts and crafts maybe where people tried to digitally replicate traditional methods, we got hand lettering stamping etc. then they swished them together and true design got shoved out the window in favour of ,
how can we grab the users attention, to
how can we hold the viewer captive, to
How can we force the viewer to absorb, to
The how can we annoy the viewer so much they will pay to just read/view in peace.
I am not sure what this design movement will be called
QR coding everything. It has it uses and is practical in certain use-cases, but don't use it everywhere.
Maybe I'm paranoid but it also seems very insecure. I've been to some restaurants where they have the menu as a qr code and you even pay for your food from the website. What's to stop a bad actor from creating a fake version of your website and stealing card data? They just need to create a qr sticker and put it on top of the one on the table.
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Did I write this?
Prompting.
Remember the day where you have to type commands on a terminal to do anything and some guy came up with "button" and "windows" and suddenly you could print yo document with a single click ?
Oh, cool, let's bring back the trend of speaking to your computer through a text area !
Fuck LLM.
Electronics that are damn-near impossible for anyone but a professional to repair.
Electronics that you can't even TRY to repair because there are no screws, the case is just glued together. I had to use a flat screwdriver as chisel along with a HAMMER to open up some dead devices like mouse and controller to see what was inside π
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