- Joined
- Oct 31, 2022
It seems like everything is designed to have that "sleek" minimalist look from logos, to electronics and buildings. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with that? It's not even that it's ugly... but it's boring as hell.
Why are current design trends so shitty?
- Thread starter Maurice Maine
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ZapparoniWorks™
kiwifarms.net
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- Aug 22, 2022
They have to avoid making anything beautiful or you might be reminded that beauty exists.
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- Oct 31, 2022
The idea came to me when I was checking out a Youtube user that sells 1950s transistor radios. How in the world could the Japs, in a blown-up shithole, engineer good portable radios with a nice aesthetic.
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- Jan 10, 2020
It's easier to manufacture things that look crap, design trends reflects the times, and as your first reply says
They want to demoralize. It creates the perfect shitstorm of absolutely bastardized aesthetics.
Marketing degree holding know-nothing new hires trying to "make their mark" (because they are crippling narcissists) on businesses by over or under designing a perfectly good product/logo/whatever for the sake of making something "new" rather than simply using something that has worked for decades.
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2022
There are three reasons for this
* Easier to look at and recognize on smaller screens
* Easier to put whatever flag you want on it for recoloring
* A symptom of humanity selling its soul to Satan
* Easier to look at and recognize on smaller screens
* Easier to put whatever flag you want on it for recoloring
* A symptom of humanity selling its soul to Satan
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2021
For cars it's the autistic chase to make the most aerodynamic shape to meet efficiency requirements. There's also a general lack of creativity among manufacturers since the mid 2010s when the Tesla minimalist style somehow captured the fascination of every braindead car executive who now commands the designers to emulate the Tesla-eque minimalist design while incorporating said company's corporate design somehow. Back in a more creative time we had cool cars from the likes of the Chrysler/Plymouth Prowler, Chevy SSR, Lexus LFA, SLR McLaren, and Ford Thunderbird.
- Joined
- Dec 2, 2018
I think the oversimplification of logos is mostly because the brands themselves are recognizable and designers most likely want to keep reinventing the logo to keep a stable job make it more "sleek and modern-looking". Lesser-known brands tend not to be simplified due to needing to stand out from the competition. It's why Firefox no longer has a fox - people don't need to see a fox encircling the globe any more, they just see the base shape of something vaguely fox-shaped (or now, tail-shaped) around a blueish sphere.
The problem is that all contemporary designers think that way, and in turn make products look nearly indistinguishable when you put them together. Google's apps (eg: Maps, Mail, Drive, etc.) used to have distinct colors and logos, but are now drastically simplified to their base elements and incorporate Google's quad-color design. You might be forgiven for confusing their apps for each other at first glance.
I also detest the corporate art style trend so much. I think one such sub-style is called Alegria (meaning "joy" in Spanish) but the Corporate Memphis-type of art predominates today's websites, especially when it comes to big tech. It's just so... ugly. I suppose one way to describe the art style is if figurative and impressionist art styles crossed paths. Simple, eye-watering colors are used with very little shading or details. People have widely disproportionate limbs and inhuman coloring to make them look as generic and "relatable" as possible by eschewing typical traits related with certain races. Corporate Memphis has a very 2-dimensional look to it that makes it uninteresting to look at. There's no depth or interesting nuances in the artwork because it's simplified so much and the subjects are usually floating in some sort of void. If other objects are shown, they're usually blobs of color with the barest traces of linework surrounding it.
It's just... garish.
The problem is that all contemporary designers think that way, and in turn make products look nearly indistinguishable when you put them together. Google's apps (eg: Maps, Mail, Drive, etc.) used to have distinct colors and logos, but are now drastically simplified to their base elements and incorporate Google's quad-color design. You might be forgiven for confusing their apps for each other at first glance.
I also detest the corporate art style trend so much. I think one such sub-style is called Alegria (meaning "joy" in Spanish) but the Corporate Memphis-type of art predominates today's websites, especially when it comes to big tech. It's just so... ugly. I suppose one way to describe the art style is if figurative and impressionist art styles crossed paths. Simple, eye-watering colors are used with very little shading or details. People have widely disproportionate limbs and inhuman coloring to make them look as generic and "relatable" as possible by eschewing typical traits related with certain races. Corporate Memphis has a very 2-dimensional look to it that makes it uninteresting to look at. There's no depth or interesting nuances in the artwork because it's simplified so much and the subjects are usually floating in some sort of void. If other objects are shown, they're usually blobs of color with the barest traces of linework surrounding it.
It's just... garish.
It’s cheap, inoffensive, and everyone else is doing it. I wish there were more behind it, but really it’s yet another trend that we will at some point move past.
There’s not much to say, even one or two influential companies/designers can kick off a new trend and there’s no stopping it.
I mean look at what one single UI framework did from Google, MaterialUI. That’s been ruining website and program design for the last eight years now.
There’s not much to say, even one or two influential companies/designers can kick off a new trend and there’s no stopping it.
I mean look at what one single UI framework did from Google, MaterialUI. That’s been ruining website and program design for the last eight years now.
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- Joined
- Jun 24, 2020
Looks like the Wikijannies missed one:
"Will someone PLEASE think of the uggos!?"
Foghorns at a Funeral
kiwifarms.net
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- Mar 29, 2022
Now i have a load of mixed feelings. My town while i was growing up had a load of brutalist buildings. Depressing solid bricks of buildings. Almost commie block level of run down. Now, they are starting to demolish it all and replace it with corpo soulless Iphone like designs. It is funny as i pass the sites it has all faux street art, that was designed in a board room. It has no connection to the town, it is just globo mystery meat art. I know the brutalist style is hated, but as i grew up around it, i got used to seeing it. I learned to love the chains of brutalism.
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2019
It’s not even nice modern design. You can have nice modern design - the whole mid century modern thing is a really pleasing aesthetic, and the 1920s modernist stuff can be nice as well. What makes modernist stuff good or bad imo is whether it keeps a sense of human proportion in it. Most brutalist stuff doesn’t do that and most mid century modern does. You can look at a brutalist building and not really find any sense of human scale in it becasue there’s nothing human in the proportion. 1950s design keeps that human scale, no matter how whizzy and jetsons it is.
Alegria art is an abomination - it provokes a real reaction of disgust in me. I guess it’s cheap, easy to produce by people with zero talent, and it ticks all the diversity boxes.
I moved jobs this autumn and the old company was full globohomo art everywhere and the new one is still 1990s tech style, all white coats and glassware and aspirational space age lab vibe. It feels so much more human and friendlier. I’ve even seen more than one white male in corporate printed materials - shocking!
Design sucks now for the same reason all the media, films, comedy, tv and music sucks. There’s no joy in it, no real artistic expression and we are ruled by joyless horrid who embody the worst bits of Puritanism and degeneracy all at once.
I look forward to Restoration 2.0
Alegria art is an abomination - it provokes a real reaction of disgust in me. I guess it’s cheap, easy to produce by people with zero talent, and it ticks all the diversity boxes.
I moved jobs this autumn and the old company was full globohomo art everywhere and the new one is still 1990s tech style, all white coats and glassware and aspirational space age lab vibe. It feels so much more human and friendlier. I’ve even seen more than one white male in corporate printed materials - shocking!
Design sucks now for the same reason all the media, films, comedy, tv and music sucks. There’s no joy in it, no real artistic expression and we are ruled by joyless horrid who embody the worst bits of Puritanism and degeneracy all at once.
I look forward to Restoration 2.0
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- Aug 17, 2018
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- Jan 4, 2021
because the majority of "designers" never used a pen & paper or letraset or anything besides a screen
- Joined
- Sep 25, 2019
Minimalism is the lowest form of aesthetic, and a plague upon all of humanity. Its also the basis from which all Current Year corporate art and aesthetic is drawn from.
That would be why. If you go back into the 1970s and 1980s you can see some examples of minimalism creeping into the corporate world, and in the 1990s it definitely took hold fully in the minds of the executive types. But it just wasn't really appealing to the average consumer until the unveiling of the iPhone. The iPhone directly sold minimalism to many people, since they were looking at and using it every single day.
jje100010001
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2020
People forget that a lot of mid-modernists were versed, or at least immersed in the classical traditional arts and education- Mies van der Rohe for instance was trained as a stoneworker long before he became a proponent of Mid-Mod minimalism, same with Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, who designed traditional-looking houses before they threw themselves into their modern designs.
And yet with the 'victory' of modernism over the prior classical arts, the classical tradition died away, and what you are seeing is the result of several generations of designers and architects who have been trained solely by modernists and postmodernists.
Ironically modernism likewise is mostly ideologically dead nowadays, and all we have left are its economics (big, fast, cheap)...
- Joined
- Dec 3, 2020
Its design trends, its always been like that, companies dont want to look our of touch but dont want to be the odd one out either so they just do whatever everyone else is doing.
Look at 70's logos, they were all the same combo of fonts and colors
You might think it has "soul" now but back then when every logo had a style like this it was generic soulless corporate garbage.
The current flat design was popularized by google, which used to copy the 3D skeumorphism that apple popularized in the mid 2000s.
Corporate propaganda from the 1950s and 60s all had the same cheaply made hannah-barbera style characters, its not that different from current corporate memphis style which is also bland and easy to make.
Look at 70's logos, they were all the same combo of fonts and colors
You might think it has "soul" now but back then when every logo had a style like this it was generic soulless corporate garbage.
The current flat design was popularized by google, which used to copy the 3D skeumorphism that apple popularized in the mid 2000s.
Corporate propaganda from the 1950s and 60s all had the same cheaply made hannah-barbera style characters, its not that different from current corporate memphis style which is also bland and easy to make.
- Joined
- Jun 24, 2020
Everything about the 70's was ugly. Especially the fashion.
Who in their right mind ever thought this looked good?
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2019
Most of those have different fonts for the same product, and yet, not a single one of those logos are in Helvetica, despite it being around since the 50s.
Beyond that, there's something to be said about designs trends back then still being limited to pre-computer manufacturing processes. I'll bet there's an interesting reason why just about everything in the 70s has that coffee-stained washed out color palette. You're right, design trends do come and go, but we're at a point where design really has no limits, up to and including AI art being a feasible thing, and this is what the world goes with? Coomers now have the power to generate as many images of white women filling their shopping carts with Wonder Bread, yet the art you see everywhere is this dystopian childish generic trash that doesn't please anyone? We finally made it to high-res screens and photorealistic CGI, we had skeuomorphic graphics for a few short years, and then all of that's just thrown out the window for flat art?
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2021