Image by: Nuno Pinheiro Following posts on specific work being done on Oxygen, this post is going to try to go beyond the manifest work and look at the bigger picture driving it. The motivation for…
  • ranzispa@mander.xyz
    5 hours

    Just think of how long it takes to craft a skeuomorphic icon compared to a symbolic monochrome one.

    About the same time.

    To be fair I’m not too fond of extremely colorful icons. They do have their place, but in most interfaces I do prefer flat or slightly shadowed icons.

    I value more the UX of the interface than the design of the icons, tough the icons are indeed important. Painting icons over KDE does not really change how you interact with KDE.

    I don’t particularly like KDE, but have not found a better DE anyway.

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5 hours

    I also always find the minimalism vs. maximalism debate interesting for usability. Lots of minimal designs are so flat that you can’t tell a button from a label or icon.
    At the same time, iOS’ new Frutiger theme regularly confuses me with its transparency, e.g. yesterday I saw that the silent-mode notification had a ➋ inside. It was centered and everything. Then the notification went away, but the ➋ stayed, because it was from an app icon behind.

    I wish, we could throw out the bad eye candy, like transparency, while keeping the good parts, like 3D buttons and such. I feel like this kind of neo-brutalist UI design isn’t the worst direction to go in:

    (This particular example isn’t perfect, like the buttons are flat, while there’s useless shadows around the boxes. But yeah, could just move those shadows to the buttons and it would still look fine.)

    • Dave.@aussie.zone
      2 hours

      Our monkey-brain has put millions of years of evolution into a vision system designed to pick up 3d cues from our environment so we can use our fine motor skills to manipulate small objects. It’s a fantastic piece of wetware that uses shading and colours to pick up 3d hints about the objects we deal with daily and - once you’re a few years old - it’s completely automatic and requires no effort to use.

      And then we remove all the 3D cues and skeuomorphic hints from our computer systems so that now the previously subconscious “monkey-click-button” process is now a foreground task where cognitive energy is burned up to identify the correct UI element to manipulate.

      I should be able to shift the mouse pointer and click a UI element out of the corner of my eye. I shouldn’t be required to look at and then parse a ‘flat’ UI to determine if this element is a button or just a panel with text. GUI elements should map to recognisable physical objects wherever possible, and where they are more abstract (eg wifi icons) they should be clearly distinguishable from others in the icon set. You’re burning up cognitive energy needlessly otherwise, and that’s why I dislike the monochromatic new age UI/icon sets.

    • FishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
      2 hours

      Checkboxes that look like left/right toggle switches are the worst. And the only way to know whether left or right is on is colour?! Can you please get in the fucking sea?

      • Vincent@feddit.nl
        1 hour

        It’s nice to be able to know that they take effect immediately though, instead of needing to click a submit button.

    • smeg@feddit.ukEnglish
      4 hours

      I actually love that design, it’s minimal without being corpo-slick. Is it just a mockup or is there some way to make all my computers look that way?

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    4 hours

    Thanks for posting @[email protected], that aeticle was more interesting & thought invoking than I thought it would be.

    I’m using XFCE with a theme that feels like it’s from the 90’s and thinking about it, it does feel better to use than all the modern craziness that Microsoft has been doing in the last few years. I hated the Metro era…

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
      2 hours

      I’m also using XFCE but with the Materia theme, because the visual noise of pseudo-3D overstimulates me and i like clean lines.

  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3 hours

    Minimalism in GUIs, maybe (still, give me CLI any day). But minimalism in housing and infrastructure is absolutely critical and they are absolutely not equal to software. We need to be as efficient as we can because I don’t know if the author has noticed the state of housing in the world. How many more “boring, dull” buildings could be built for the same price? How many more if we copy pasted the same designs instead of demanding everything be unique? (But god forbid they be too different from the existing style or else the NIMBYs protesting minimalist buildings complain about that too.) The people who “prefer” the visually complex building have never been homeless in the back alley of that building before, nor have they ever been priced out of their neighbourhood by gentrification when their boring gray building gets torn down to build the pretty building.