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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- 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 in cars being replaced by screens. If auto manufacturers could figure out how to make the steering wheel a screen, they would. Impossible to work on those things.
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.
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 :(
Why does everything need to be an app by the way?
So they can track you and collect your data.
On that same note, every appliance being designed with internet connectivity when there’s no conceivable reason for it to be there. No, I don’t want my fridge or my thermostat or my coffee maker to connect to the internet. And I am never going to put one of those
surveillance devicessmart speakers in my home, ever.What management seems as innovation should result in lost heads. Their lost heads. Fire those people.
But if you don’t, how will they charge you a subscription for continued usage of your fridge?
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.
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
Did I write this?
Corporate Memphis, and I’ll get ahead of the curve, whatever its successor is. Probably some kind of AI-chic.
I suspect Corporate Memphis is partly successful because it works with ambiguous skin colours, so it automatically ticks diversity boxes without the artist having to think too hard about representation.
My prediction is that the successor will double down on that. I hope it’s cartoony style anthropomorphic animals.
Milano mepphis was one of the last hurrah of post modern. A decent trend at least. Corporate Memphis is an abomination. It’s like meeting Clint Eastwoods great grandchild who has a mullet, has no option on anything, and works as a real estate agent. It’s not wrong but lack of character and conviction is such a bore.
QR coding everything. It has it uses and is practical in certain use-cases, but don’t use it everywhere.
saw a mall once that didn’t have its hours printed or posted anywhere and only had a printed-out QR code u had to scan if u wanted to check the hours. turned my ass right tf around and never came back.
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.
That’s actually a huge problem and I don’t get why it is not talked about more. We all learn about validating links in emails and are very careful about clicking anything there. But QR codes we just scan and open without thinking.
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.
- houses designed as if they were some private plastic surgeon’s office;
- neopentec churches with black walls.
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).
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 😡
Stupid delayed popups right where you’re about to click
🤬
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.
