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Opinions on minimalist design?


In most cases, minimalist design (flat colours and shapes, simplistic fonts, etc.) looks extremely ugly, in my opinion. It's boring, bland, and soulless.
That doesn't mean minimalism is entirely bad, though. Some companies do it right, like Discord and Google. Some companies, however, do it in the worst way possible, like Microsoft with their godawful "Microsoft Design Language", and Reddit with the New Reddit theme. Minimalism is very easy to do, but very hard to do correctly.

Feel free to share your own opinions on minimalist design in this thread.
"Glauben Sie nicht alles, was Sie im Internet lesen." - Karl Marx
I think there is a line between simplicity and crude.

And minimalist design needs detail too (like these drop shadows in Material Design).

Microsoft's one is morely crude; Just some squares with zero real decoration isn't a good idea, at least to me.
As a solo fangame/indie game creator, thanks to minimalist design getting popular, I can design UI for a game without many headaches.

I can literally make a rounded rectangle button with PS in seconds. :P

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Changing away from it is hard. Like, can we at least have the option between minimalist and not? That's what I hate the most about minimalist design. Am I the only one?
Hello.
Originally posted by I don't know a good name.
Changing away from it is hard. Like, can we at least have the option between minimalist and not? That's what I hate the most about minimalist design. Am I the only one?

No, you’re not alone in that. Having in-your-face minimalistic designs forced on me pisses me off to no end, especially if it was better in the past without a way to retain the better old design.

iOS forcing minimalism is one of my biggest examples of something that should’ve never happened.

Originally posted by Exodustx0
iOS forcing minimalism is one of my biggest examples of something that should’ve never happened.


Ugh, yes. iOS 6 certainly ain't the prettiest OS around, but at least it looked better than iOS 7 and beyond.
"Glauben Sie nicht alles, was Sie im Internet lesen." - Karl Marx
I have less of a problem with minimalist design compared to how much I dislike the way buttons and menus are often designed these days. Three vertical dots to symbolize "more" makes no sense from an intuitive standpoint. Or a rectangle with part of an up arrow coming out of it to symbolize "upload" in some apps. I know a paper clip to attach a file isn't that intuitive at first, so this is probably me being old and not wanting new icons, but at the same time I can't help but feel like a lot of the more modern universal symbols for things are nowhere near as easily understandable compared to older tech symbology. I especially notice it when I have to help my mom navigate things on her smartphone. She's gonna be 70 this year, and so it's not easy for her to figure everything out on her phone. She doesn't look for the 3 dots, or always remember that pressing and holding on something is essentially a "right-click" but on a phone.

That kind of stuff bugs me a lot more than minimalist design does, but they seem to always go hand-in-hand these days.
I hate minimalist design. It is too simple for my liking.

Everyone switch to maximalist design!
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I tend to like making sure the user has enough details to know what is up and also plenty of options to make things flexible.

I tend to go against minimalist design and am a bit of a stickler for details. Software/sites functionality shouldn't have you guess what things do. At the same time you don't want too much "busy" going on either.

A balance must be kept and people tend to lean one way or another. Doesn't help with the many, many, many screen resolutions these days...

The whole idea of minimalism (to me) is to make your user interface's elements easily distinguishable from each other by avoiding unnecessary items that don't to anything and making the user focus only on what's important. Have the icons contain only what they need to be distinguished from one another, no need to overcomplicate it. I really like it, actually. But making it too bland though, defeats the whole purpose!

Instead of suffering because of having too many details and not being able to process everything that you're seeing, you'd be suffering because everything's so similar you can barely tell everything apart! Even Microsoft is realizing that they went a bit too far with their minimalism and decided to step back a bit. A few of Windows 10's apps are having their icons gradually changed.