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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Corporate whimsy. I forget what the name coined for it was. It has bubbly oddly proportioned people and pastel colors. As an example.
you’re not complaining about “design trends”, you’re complaining about capitalism.
everything is touchscreen because it’s cheaper than mechanical buttons.
all products looks the same because 1. it’s cheaper 2. mass appeal is more profitable than niche, and 3. it’s risk free
everything’s an app because they can collect data, push notifications, and force you into closed ecosystems.
laptops are thin because they probably sell more as a lot of people prioritize lightweight and less bulky laptops to carry them around easier. phones are going the other way but when you’re talking laptops it’s kilograms rather than grams so the difference is more important.
finally rounded corners are probably a design trend, although i am generally in favor of them.
- Light and dark modes with nothing in between. Platinum from MacOS and the default look from Windows 95 were crisp and bright without burning out your eyeballs.
- Wasted screen space. People laugh at Japanese websites for looking too busy, but I’d much rather deal with that than scroll for ages or look for links buried 3 levels deep in a hamburger menu.
- The idea that everything needs a backlit color LCD screen.
- Modern standby on laptops. Sure I could just hibernate it, but that’s very inelegant when S3 sleep was perfectly fine before.
- Glued-together electronics.
Out of curiosity, what is the difference between older S3 sleep and modern sleep?
S3 sleep powers down all major components except for RAM. Modern sleep also keeps the CPU and network up, albeit in a low power state. It’s not always executed well, hence the reports of laptops cooking themselves in a bag or draining overnight despite being “in sleep mode”.
Ah, that’s exactly what mine does sometimes.
I don’t think light modes were as glaring in the past, first of all monitors were smaller, second I don’t think they were as bright.
Colors. House color options are stupid as shit. Especially if you’re selling. Car color options. Why is everything so boring? Where’s the teal and hot pink, and yellow with red stripes, amd rainbow, and glittery purple, and burnt orange and…
All houses are mostly beige-y white, or soft dark colors or something boring. All cars are black, white, or boring shades of blue, maybe red. No interesting shades. And then the inside of the car is like beige.
Meanwhile electronics, especially computer parts have too many fucking lights that are distracting as shit.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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Rounded corners. Everywhere. They lose so much space, especially on small screens, and everything feels crammed.
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No personalization anywhere. You used to be able to completely customize social media profiles, to the point of editing your page’s CSS directly.
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Modern OSes (except linux or BSD based ones which are not android) also have no color or personalization. You usually have the slabs of white on light mode, or the slabs of blak on dark mode, with only one color you can choose for some details.
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JavaScript animations on every. Single. Website. I have an old phone (because I don’t like modern stuff), and it struggles with almost every modern, animated site. Is it really necessary to add all that js and animations?
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No headphone jacks or expandable storage on modern phones. It probably costs cents to add those features. I know phones don’t usually have expandable storage because it makes you buy a new one once you fill all your storage, and I know they don’t have audio jacks because it makes you buy the company’s wireless headphones, but I need those features in my phone.
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Why does everything have to be a web app now? Have people forgotten about actual softwate, that you own, that doesn’t need internet to work, that uses almost no resources and is faster and has more features than a web app? We got everything backward. Sites that should be webs like reddit will ask you to download their apps, while microsoft will try to code Word in javascript and sell it to you as an “upgrade”.
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I hate subscriptions with passion, especially for software.
There’s so much javascript everywhere… A few years ago I used to be able to browse the internet with the NoScript extension, and it only required a few allows now and then. Now NOTHING works without javascript, and each website needs you to allow 20 others websites for it to work…
I’ve tried COSMIC DE Beta on Pop!_OS on an older laptop I have around, and the feature I’m looking forward to most, that I’ve seen and experienced from my mininal usage of it, is the ability to easily change colours from settings. Not just accent colours, but window colours, text colours, etc. From what I recall, I could, for instance, recreate Hot Dog Stand, the Windows 3.1 colour theme, right from the system settings app, no third party downloads
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Everything being extruded, quickest to make crap is getting ridiculous. Even the expensive stuff looks like IKEA.
I miss craftsmanship and artistry.
In many places doorknobs are being phased out of codes precisely because they aren’t accessible like a lever style is.
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.
that’s one of the reasons I specifically picked a bright lime green for my car
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 😬
- 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 😭
Big phones. Why wont they produce anything that fits in one hand anymore?
For me it’s big phones being the most featureful phones.
Gimme a small phone with the camera array of the Galaxy Ultra and my wallet it yours
Of course a bigger phone fits more stuff. I dont really care about that very much though. But seems Im not the typical target customer.
The advantage of an app is that they can use more permissions etc to spy on you even more compared to your browser.
And don’t forget the biggest plus; they can also sell your data! Isn’t that wonderful?
Also you can’t force an app to close for real and not access the internet to do heaven knows what, unless you install specific apps to force close them and control them, which most people won’t do since they don’t even realize that an app is not really closed when they close it…
Modern construction on a budget. It uses little more than reinforced cardboard and a moisture barrier. Sometimes the cardboard isn’t even glued or nailed in. So it can literally get unfolded by the wind, and suddenly the only thing preventing your house from getting water damage is a .3mm piece of plastic wrap that you HOPE the contractors didn’t damage or install improperly.
Here’s one such house. I don’t know if it would even last a decade without significant repairs. They voided the warranty on the roof already too, so you could be out tens of thousands of dollars before you even move in.
- 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!
I loath the modern obsession with minimalist, utilitarian design. Everything is just a white, black, or grey slab with no artistic thought put into its form. Buildings, homes, cars, clothes, electronic devices. It’s almost like a capitalist version of brutalism. Even the design of user interfaces is usually a pile of flat, washed out rectangles now. It’s like the soul has been sucked out of everything we make, reduced to it’s most basic form. It can feel anti-human at times. Like the world has collectively decided that beauty is a waste of time.
