alt Hacker NewsI got through this entire article before I realized it was written by someone I worked with back in my agency days. Beth is an awesome designer with a great eye. Nice to see her on the front page here. Now, to the content: I often wonder how much we have lost with our endless quest for minimalism. We can't even make buttons look like buttons anymore. Affordances have become anemic at times. Designers who think and care deeply about functional color theory and usable design should be cherished.
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Modern designers do not give rat's ass about ergonomics and functionality. Their ultimate design is an empty screen with some light gray color on white text and inability to distinguish between active (can interact with) and info elements
This could do with a little better colour design, but let me just give you this to look at:
https://gjcp.net/plugins/peacock/
Yeah. Skeuomorphism isn't dead. Buttons need to look like buttons. Sliders need to look like sliders.
You just know looking at it that when you click on the little buttons, they pop in slightly as the LEDs go on and off, right? Does it look cheesy and 80s and dated? Yeah it sounds cheesy and 80s and dated too.
[dead]
I'm reminded of an article a while back talking about how the change from sodium streetlights to LED streetlights had a whole lot of unforeseen effects on animals, people's sleep patterns, driver awareness and visibility, etc. due to color changes. There was a comment on the article from an old civil engineer saying "no, these were not unforeseen, we actually did the research back in the day to figure out what color the street lights should be, that's why they were the color they were."