The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design
I don't really care about "fun", but I just can't find the words to explain how happy I am that there's a chance we might put all this flat madness behind us. I'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 "Edit" button<p>Mom: Which one's the edit button?<p>Me: Uh, the... um, it'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't click (for bonus points: not trying to click something for five minutes like an idiot, only to find out it'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 "isolate" 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's 1024x768 screen 20+ years ago.<p>* Being able to tell file types apart from each other when I'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's in the icons, not based on colours. People keep parroting this idea that "symbolic icons are easily to tell apart from each other because they're so simple" 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'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.