The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design
I don&#x27;t really care about &quot;fun&quot;, but I just can&#x27;t find the words to explain how happy I am that there&#x27;s a chance we might put all this flat madness behind us. I&#x27;m looking forward to:<p>* Not having this conversation with my mom (who, at 60+, is remarkably adept with computers but hey, we all run into trouble sometimes) over the phone anymore:<p>Me: Okay mom, now press the &quot;Edit&quot; button<p>Mom: Which one&#x27;s the edit button?<p>Me: Uh, the... um, it&#x27;s the one that kindda looks like... a bunch of lines in a rectangle, I guess?<p>Mom: Alex they all look like lines in a rectangle<p>* Not hovering everything for five minutes until I can figure out what I can click and what I can&#x27;t click (for bonus points: not trying to click something for five minutes like an idiot, only to find out it&#x27;s a label, not a disabled button)<p>* Buttons, tree views, tabs and all that having relief borders again, not necessarily because I like <i>that</i>, but because without it, the only way to &quot;isolate&quot; the information in them is using whitespace, and seven years of flat design hell later I can fit only slightly more content on my 1920x1080 screen than I could fit my Amiga&#x27;s 1024x768 screen 20+ years ago.<p>* Being able to tell file types apart from each other when I&#x27;m browsing at minimum zoom level -- which is how you end up browsing <i>any</i> collection of more than a few dozen items or so<p>* Being able to tell application icons apart based on what&#x27;s in the icons, not based on colours. People keep parroting this idea that &quot;symbolic icons are easily to tell apart from each other because they&#x27;re so simple&quot; but when <i>all</i> icons are a letter or some anonymous symbol on a blob of colour, they <i>all</i> look the same when you put a few dozen of them next to each other. Maybe they&#x27;re easy to tell apart when you have like four 128x128px icons but when you have 40 of them in a tiny dock at the bottom of your screen, the only useful information they retain is what colour they are.