I think there’s one more big angle to modern design minimalism. It gets out of the way.

Every day, we are bombarded with millions of design elements. If they would all scream, show themselves, try to be special, many would get overwhelmed, overloaded, overburdened. The classic design screams individuality, impression, emotion. The minimalist one is there for the function without distraction, like a quiet servant - there when you need it, out of sight elsewhere. It’s a design philosophy of an age when everything is at your fingertips.

With that said, and with my strong preference to modern, minimalist designs, I appreciate the effort others put into making their computing experience truly reflect their workflow and intention.

It doesn’t feel like it was made with the idea of being anything more than a clean product that gets the job done

I mean, “clean product that gets the job done” is fine with me. Let people theme/customize and it’s win-win IMO.

Minimalism in GUIs, maybe (still, give me CLI any day). But minimalism in housing and infrastructure is absolutely critical and they are absolutely not equal to software. We need to be as efficient as we can because I don’t know if the author has noticed the state of housing in the world. How many more “boring, dull” buildings could be built for the same price? How many more if we copy pasted the same designs instead of demanding everything be unique? (But god forbid they be too different from the existing style or else the NIMBYs protesting minimalist buildings complain about that too.) The people who “prefer” the visually complex building have never been homeless in the back alley of that building before, nor have they ever been priced out of their neighbourhood by gentrification when their boring gray building gets torn down to build the pretty building.

It’s time to bring back this stuff!

I also always find the minimalism vs. maximalism debate interesting for usability. Lots of minimal designs are so flat that you can’t tell a button from a label or icon.
At the same time, iOS’ new Frutiger theme regularly confuses me with its transparency, e.g. yesterday I saw that the silent-mode notification had a ➋ inside. It was centered and everything. Then the notification went away, but the ➋ stayed, because it was from an app icon behind.

I wish, we could throw out the bad eye candy, like transparency, while keeping the good parts, like 3D buttons and such. I feel like this kind of neo-brutalist UI design isn’t the worst direction to go in:

(This particular example isn’t perfect, like the buttons are flat, while there’s useless shadows around the boxes. But yeah, could just move those shadows to the buttons and it would still look fine.)

One good thing about minimalist GUIs is they’re much easier to optimize. Of course, you can still fuck it up, especially if your name is Microslop. Amazing how relatively demanging monochromatic rectangles with no animations can be.

You don’t have to optimize rounded corners, blur or fancy animations if you don’t code them in at all. Not necessarily the best approach, but at least there’s a positive. Everything can be messed up easily, but not everything can be done right easily.

Thanks for posting @SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml, that aeticle was more interesting & thought invoking than I thought it would be.

I’m using XFCE with a theme that feels like it’s from the 90’s and thinking about it, it does feel better to use than all the modern craziness that Microsoft has been doing in the last few years. I hated the Metro era…