What are the modern design trends you hate most? Feel free to rant! Mine are:
- Physical buttons are out of fashion, now EVERYTHING must have a touch screen instead! Especially if it makes the appliance more inconvenient to use. Like having to press a flimsy touch screen ten times to scroll through a washing machine’s programs instead of just turning a physical knob and pressing a physical start button.
- Every website looks like it’s made for a phone and was vomited by the same app in slightly different flavors of vomit. And then having the nerve to tell you to download the mobile app 😑
- Why does everything need to be an app by the way? Especially when the only advantage the app gives you over the website is that you’re not constantly spammed with messages telling you to use the app… Are you making your website shittier on purpose so I feel like I have to use the app?.. I don’t WANT your app, you can shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.
- Actually EVERYTHING looks like it’s made for a phone… Like what’s the deal with all those hamburger menus on DESKTOP software? Please just put a regular menu and same me some pointless clicking, it’s not like you’re lacking screen space. I especially hate that those menus can’t be opened from the keyboard like regular menus. You know, “keyboards”? Those things that people on DESKTOPS use?
- All phones look the same. All laptops look the same. It’s boring as hell.
- Laptops must be as thin and flimsy as possible. Bonus points if you can’t even fit an ethernet port.
- I’m so sick of rounded corners everywhere… 😭
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- 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.
I don’t think light modes were as glaring in the past, first of all monitors were smaller, second I don’t think they were as bright.
Corporate whimsy. I forget what the name coined for it was. It has bubbly oddly proportioned people and pastel colors. As an example.
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.
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.
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
Of course a bigger phone fits more stuff. I dont really care about that very much though. But seems Im not the typical target customer.
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.
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 am a die hard laptop/desktop person but the majority of my outside of work ‘computer’ time is on my phone these days :(
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.
I do get the efficiency point, and it did improve accessibility massively. I don’t want to downplay that. Like not having huge paragraphs of text take the whole width of the screen anymore helped improve readability a lot. Or pages of text over a background image… that was a nightmare. But it would be nice to have efficiency and accessibility without every website looking the same. There has to be a way to make websites look interesting without the design hindering users from reaching the information they want… But I assume that it would require a lot more effort, and that’s not a priority for most websites. I guess the priority isn’t to look interesting anymore but SEO? Maybe it comes from the changing nature of the internet, with big websites getting most of the traffic and replacing everything else? Like having markets with crazy stalls everywhere replaced by malls… I guess it’s easier for a small website made by one person about a topic they are passionate about to take the risk of a creative design than it would be for Facebook to do it.
That’s about it. Clients often have an idea of what they want, inspired by stuff they’ve seen already. It’s just safer to request stuff that already works than innovate. So designers might have more interesting and readable ideas but they end up doing what the client wants anyway. Good way to see this is designer’s online portfolios.
A good client provides some guidance but offers a fair amount of freedom in regards to exploration, the average client has an idea of what they want already, and the worst kind of client tells you what they want from the go (because most often it just won’t work).
Did I write this?
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.
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.
I’ve 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 “cozy cabin/cottage” and I think we nailed it. It’s very rustic.
I really hate the modern trends of white, black, steel, and glass.
It’s the shape of things, too. They have no character.
I was shopping for door knobs recently, because all the knobs in this house are spherical and smooth. They’re impossible to grip. We have a disabled person in the house who struggles to turn them. Gloves slip right off.
At the hardware store is an entire aisle full of doorknobs, but nearly all of them are the exact same smooth spherical shape. The rest were ugly rectangular lever styles that work but look very industrial in a home that’s mostly natural textures.
Somehow all these brands, finishes, locking features, price ranges, dozens of product variations, and literally only two doorknob shapes. Both so minimalist as to be almost impractical.
I had to settle for the lever style for one door, and just put grip tape on the others.
Everything being extruded, quickest to make crap is getting ridiculous. Even the expensive stuff looks like IKEA.
I miss craftsmanship and artistry.
In many places doorknobs are being phased out of codes precisely because they aren’t accessible like a lever style is.
I really thought we’d have a vibrant post pandemic ‘roaring 2020’s’. Seems like it wasn’t handled right and so we’re sort of still stuck in the same doldrums.
Most cars are black, white, gray, or silver.
I fucking hate these new vehicles with the paint that has no sparkle to it, especially the horrible grey one. So called Putty ass-whips
Your link made me remind one more thing i absolutely hate: TALKING HEADS. Like bloody hell TV and video was made to present visual content and comments and the same time, not for me to look on some selfappointed youtube personality yapping just so his video is few minutes longer wasting my time.
Also podcasts, audiobooks and generally the trend to make everything audible. I mean i do not mind this by itself, but i would love to have a transcript so i don’t need to wade through hours of senseless yapping and unfun banter to find the info i need to.
It looks like primer and the car is unfinished
Yeah it’s so depressing when everything looks dull and muted everywhere 😬
that’s one of the reasons I specifically picked a bright lime green for my car
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.
those stupid lazy selection lists that seem to load asynchronously. items show up late to the party and are allowed to actually cut in line, shuffling the order of the existing (clickable) items below. how did those ever get approved?
There’s 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.
- 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 “how is this even allowed on the street” kind of big and its so annoying. if i got hit by one of those i would probably die immediately 😭
- 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™”…
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 😡
Robot support
I had a good, brief conversation with one the other day. I told it I was going to their competitor because they didn’t have annoying chat pop-ups.
Stupid delayed popups right where you’re about to click
🤬
