Asklemmy

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.

Corporate whimsy. I forget what the name coined for it was. It has bubbly oddly proportioned people and pastel colors. As an example.

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.

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.

https://youtu.be/mRuO62aNBEE

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.

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.

• All new cars look the same and are way bigger than necessary

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

• 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 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.

• Rounded corners. Everywhere. They lose so much space, especially on small screens, and everything feels crammed.

• No personalization anywhere. You used to be able to completely customize social media profiles, to the point of editing your page's CSS directly.

• 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.

• 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?

• 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.

• 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".

• I hate subscriptions with passion, especially for software.

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?

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.

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

QR coding everything. It has it uses and is practical in certain use-cases, but don't use it everywhere.

• 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.

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.

Smart everything. I’m 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

Electronics that are damn-near impossible for anyone but a professional to repair.

• 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 :

Big phones. Why wont they produce anything that fits in one hand anymore?

Corporate Memphis, and I’ll get ahead of the curve, whatever its successor is. Probably some kind of AI-chic.

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.

Actually EVERYTHING looks like it’s made for a phone…

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'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.

The home, back, and switch app buttons on Android being replaced with that bar like on the iPhone.

I especially miss the back button, swiping from the edge of the screen is nowhere near as ergonomic. It also replaced the ability to reveal the side panel by swiping from the left edge, so now you have to tap the hamburger menu way up at the top left corner of the screen for it, which requires either your other hand or you have to shimmy the phone down your hand until you can reach it.

Also, when you have a full screen video playing, you have to swipe up once to reveal the bar, and then again to actually close out of the app. That made sense with buttons but why the hell is it still the case with the bar?

Double tapping the switch app button to switch between the two most recent apps was also more convenient than swiping up to reveal the app manager and dragging the window to the right, and when you want to go to the previous app, whether it's on the right or left side of the current one seems to depend on how long you've been on the app for, which means you can never build up muscle memory since it changes all the time.

Another case of Google trying to imitate Apple's UX but seemingly not actually doing any of the usability testing and polishing that Apple does, and generally making it both worse than Apple's implementation and worse than what was there before.

Interrupted garden paths. Like stepping stones in lawn. Just put a continual path. Stepping stones are terrible for access and maintenance. Just grass or just paving would be preferable.