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… 😭
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).