What are the modern design trends you hate most? Feel free to rant! Mine are:
- Physical buttons are out of fashion, now EVERYTHING must have a touch screen instead! Especially if it makes the appliance more inconvenient to use. Like having to press a flimsy touch screen ten times to scroll through a washing machine’s programs instead of just turning a physical knob and pressing a physical start button.
- Every website looks like it’s made for a phone and was vomited by the same app in slightly different flavors of vomit. And then having the nerve to tell you to download the mobile app 😑
- Why does everything need to be an app by the way? Especially when the only advantage the app gives you over the website is that you’re not constantly spammed with messages telling you to use the app… Are you making your website shittier on purpose so I feel like I have to use the app?.. I don’t WANT your app, you can shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.
- Actually EVERYTHING looks like it’s made for a phone… Like what’s the deal with all those hamburger menus on DESKTOP software? Please just put a regular menu and same me some pointless clicking, it’s not like you’re lacking screen space. I especially hate that those menus can’t be opened from the keyboard like regular menus. You know, “keyboards”? Those things that people on DESKTOPS use?
- All phones look the same. All laptops look the same. It’s boring as hell.
- Laptops must be as thin and flimsy as possible. Bonus points if you can’t even fit an ethernet port.
- I’m so sick of rounded corners everywhere… 😭
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Everything you said.
Programs > apps (in the sense of the word)
Everything looks nearly identical online
Stupid delayed popups right where you’re about to click
Websites making ANY chime/beep/noise in an attempt to direct you to their garbage robot support
Robot support
No companies having phones anymore…zero accountability.
Everything being forced to some social media garbage to tell a company how their service/product is broken and you need help
Robot support
I had a good, brief conversation with one the other day. I told it I was going to their competitor because they didn’t have annoying chat pop-ups.
Stupid delayed popups right where you’re about to click
🤬
Right the robot support… Especially when the only way to reach support on a website is to go through the annoying support chatbot first… and it’s designed intentionally this way to increase the chances of you just giving up 😡
I used to be able to point to ling’s cars as a holdout of fun web page design, but they’ve changed v.v
https://web.archive.org/web/20110108151026/https://www.lingscars.com/
Car centric cities by far. Bring back walkable neighborhoods and give me options to move around instead of only being able to be stuck inside a car
Touch screens on fitness watches is the dumbest shit. I straight up can’t use it while jogging and sweating. I just need a couple real buttons, but good luck finding that.
Corporate whimsy. I forget what the name coined for it was. It has bubbly oddly proportioned people and pastel colors. As an example.
Prompting.
Remember the day where you have to type commands on a terminal to do anything and some guy came up with “button” and “windows” and suddenly you could print yo document with a single click ?
Oh, cool, let’s bring back the trend of speaking to your computer through a text area !
Fuck LLM.
- Completely flat chiclet keyboards on laptops. It drives me absolutely insane because I can barely tell if my fingers are aligned with the keys. Thanks, Apple!
- Hidden controls on desktop software or desktop websites (ex: hidden exit, forward, and back controls on picture galleries)
- Hiding or collapsing scrollbars on desktop software
In general, it seems like there’s a major trend in design of form beating the heck out of function. It looks pretty! Who cares if you can actually use it or not?
I’d argue it’s less “It looks pretty” as “It looks modern™”…
You definitely have a good point!
UI elements that expand and cover up other UI elements when you mouse over them.
“Flat” color schemes where you can’t even tell where one UI element ends and the other begins.
Infinite scroll instead of pagination.
The home, back, and switch app buttons on Android being replaced with that bar like on the iPhone.
I especially miss the back button, swiping from the edge of the screen is nowhere near as ergonomic.
Also, when you have a full screen video playing, you have to swipe up once to reveal the bar, and then again to actually close out of the app. That made sense with buttons but why the hell is it still the case with the bar?
You can bring back the old control scheme! You can even flip it which my gf uses cause it’s easier for her to reach.
- houses designed as if they were some private plastic surgeon’s office;
- neopentec churches with black walls.
The trend toward subdued color palettes. Every new home is decorated in “millennial gray.” Most cars are black, white, gray, or silver. You have to go out of your way to find bright, colorful clothing or furniture. It’s incredibly boring and I can’t wait for the pendulum to swing back the other way.
Most cars are black, white, gray, or silver.
I fucking hate these new vehicles with the paint that has no sparkle to it, especially the horrible grey one. So called Putty ass-whips
Your link made me remind one more thing i absolutely hate: TALKING HEADS. Like bloody hell TV and video was made to present visual content and comments and the same time, not for me to look on some selfappointed youtube personality yapping just so his video is few minutes longer wasting my time.
Also podcasts, audiobooks and generally the trend to make everything audible. I mean i do not mind this by itself, but i would love to have a transcript so i don’t need to wade through hours of senseless yapping and unfun banter to find the info i need to.
It looks like primer and the car is unfinished
Yeah it’s so depressing when everything looks dull and muted everywhere 😬
Don’t worry, it will. I’m a designer and the one thing you can count is all of us designers get bored every few years and flip things around. That’s how buttons keep shifting from rounded corners to square corners every few years.
that’s one of the reasons I specifically picked a bright lime green for my car
It’s the shape of things, too. They have no character.
I was shopping for door knobs recently, because all the knobs in this house are spherical and smooth. They’re impossible to grip. We have a disabled person in the house who struggles to turn them. Gloves slip right off.
At the hardware store is an entire aisle full of doorknobs, but nearly all of them are the exact same smooth spherical shape. The rest were ugly rectangular lever styles that work but look very industrial in a home that’s mostly natural textures.
Somehow all these brands, finishes, locking features, price ranges, dozens of product variations, and literally only two doorknob shapes. Both so minimalist as to be almost impractical.
I had to settle for the lever style for one door, and just put grip tape on the others.
In many places doorknobs are being phased out of codes precisely because they aren’t accessible like a lever style is.
Everything being extruded, quickest to make crap is getting ridiculous. Even the expensive stuff looks like IKEA.
I miss craftsmanship and artistry.
I hate that. I had my home built to spec a few years ago. The exterior siding is cedar shake stained a chocolatey brown with forest green trim, and the interior is white walls but with natural wood trim, pale golden laminate wood flooring, and two tone hickory wood cabinets, and the interior doors are all just natural wood unpainted.
I’ve leaned into the wood aesthetic with my DIY standing desk and custom pine desktop stained a dark red oak color, among various other earth tone color hints, and splashes of brighter decoration here and there.
Was going for “cozy cabin/cottage” and I think we nailed it. It’s very rustic.
I really hate the modern trends of white, black, steel, and glass.
I really thought we’d have a vibrant post pandemic ‘roaring 2020’s’. Seems like it wasn’t handled right and so we’re sort of still stuck in the same doldrums.
Webpages bouncing stuff around as various elements load in.
Back in the day, the space would be reserved, so if something hadn’t loaded yet, that space would be blank.
Nowadays, you’ll be reading something (or worse – trying to click on something), and it’ll get bounced around because some other element of the webpage got loaded in.
those stupid lazy selection lists that seem to load asynchronously. items show up late to the party and are allowed to actually cut in line, shuffling the order of the existing (clickable) items below. how did those ever get approved?
There’s a special place in hell for CSS flexboxes
This trend is, incidentally, solely because we a higher percentage of programmers knew what they were doing.
It’s easier to build a webpage, but more people can make them worse quality, now.
QR coding everything. It has it uses and is practical in certain use-cases, but don’t use it everywhere.
Maybe I’m paranoid but it also seems very insecure. I’ve been to some restaurants where they have the menu as a qr code and you even pay for your food from the website. What’s to stop a bad actor from creating a fake version of your website and stealing card data? They just need to create a qr sticker and put it on top of the one on the table.
That’s actually a huge problem and I don’t get why it is not talked about more. We all learn about validating links in emails and are very careful about clicking anything there. But QR codes we just scan and open without thinking.
saw a mall once that didn’t have its hours printed or posted anywhere and only had a printed-out QR code u had to scan if u wanted to check the hours. turned my ass right tf around and never came back.
- All new cars look the same and are way bigger than necessary
slightly related but every time i see one of those pickup trucks i am reminded of just how big they are, like “how is this even allowed on the street” kind of big and its so annoying. if i got hit by one of those i would probably die immediately 😭
Corporate Memphis, and I’ll get ahead of the curve, whatever its successor is. Probably some kind of AI-chic.
Milano mepphis was one of the last hurrah of post modern. A decent trend at least. Corporate Memphis is an abomination. It’s like meeting Clint Eastwoods great grandchild who has a mullet, has no option on anything, and works as a real estate agent. It’s not wrong but lack of character and conviction is such a bore.
I suspect Corporate Memphis is partly successful because it works with ambiguous skin colours, so it automatically ticks diversity boxes without the artist having to think too hard about representation.
My prediction is that the successor will double down on that. I hope it’s cartoony style anthropomorphic animals.
