On tech forums like r/linux or hackernews, you’ll frequently see posts by (presumably) old guys reminiscing about how great the user interface of their youth was.
“Oh how tasteful were these pixel art icons!”
“How utilitarian and consistent were the 3D effects!”
“How very intuitive are these menus!”
“It’s all gone downhill since $PRODUCT. It’s all flat and empty and useless now!”
Bollocks. These user interfaces sucked. The menus were a mess, because trying to shove 50 random items into 6 hierarchical categories, two of which are preordained to be “File” and “Edit”, cannot be done in any way that isn’t arbitrary and confusing. Thus you looked through all the little menus with your terrible mouse hoping to find something that sounded like it might be what you need, trying not to make a sudden move that made the submenu disappear.
Under the menu bar were between 30 and 200 tiny pixel art icons. They were just as incomprehensible as today’s minimalist ones, only there were more of them and most of them looked like ass.
Oh and so many popup windows. Everything you did created a popup window. Why does the settings popup only use one third of the screen while having three tabs? Why can I see my document underneath it, half-obscured, but I can’t actually click on anything there? Why do half the operations create an “OK” popup for me to click on?
Nothing about this was “functional” and yet it also looked grey and cramped and ugly. Like it was designed by C++ programmers (who by their choice of programming language have already proven that their opinion cannot be trusted, especially not in matters involving good taste), which of course it was.
Fucking brain worms, all of them.
Nah, Windows 95 and Mac OS 8 were the pinnacle of aesthetics. I fucking hate “sleek,” I hate minimalistic. UIs just keep getting uglier and uglier. I want the nice grey boxes.
Also, I want a case and peripherals without any goddam rgb lights on them.
I have an RGB graphics card poking its lights out of the tiny vents on my lenovo desktop case from 2010 now lmao
I didn’t know it was RGB and I don’t know how to turn them off :gigachad-hd:
I just paint over every bullshit indicator LED on everything I own with black nail polish. I despise how product designers now insist on putting super bright blue LEDs on everything. I do not need the humidifier or toothbrush two rooms away to illuminate my bedroom brightly enough to read a book and blue is the worst colour for brain-fucking a sleep schedule. I used to have crippling insomnia but now that I have covered up all the unnecessary LEDs in my home, I now sleep perfectly.
I hate minimalistic
I hate the anti-user, dick-sized space between text, 200MB electron app with 1MB+ css files, anti-4k-monitor bullshit that gets passed off as “minimalist design” these days.
functional is way more minimalist than what passes for minimalist today.
It does though, and empty space is good. It separates things, making them easier to see. Also there’s now only one menu instead of six, which is an improvement in my book.
hamburger menus weren’t that bad, it was certainly an abused feature (to the point where some apps had TWO drawers, on the left and right), but it was a better experience than the iOS HID sanctioned more button on the tab bar, i think. I mean depending on what you’re doing, you’re going to cram everything onto a menu anyway. Apple should have officially sanctioned the left hamburger icon experience and make it consistent across interfaces.
Windows NT grey boxes are the brutalism of desktop aesthetics.
GUIs are all shit. just absolute unusable dogshit. the only good UI we’ve ever made is the commandline, and even that is “through a glass darkly”
fighting over which of them is better is like fighting over what uniform you’d prefer the concentration camp guard to wear as they shove you in the oven.
Ok. Equating a GUI for an every-day piece of electronics with genocide is pretty fucking wide, even for this place.
Maybe go away and try to rethink this bit, eh?
I’d argue this is a silly take. A well designed interface is like a language for how your brain interacts with the machine. A well designed or customized UI paired to the right user goes far.
