Are westerners entering a period of “minimalism fatigue”? Anecdotally it seems like color and texture are slowly taking hold in designs, especially in works targeting a younger demographic.

Example: liquid glass, anything published by Taco Bell, the meme of making sites look like they came from Geocities in 99, etc...

▲

thewebguyd 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I hope so. I never bought into the minimalism/flat design hype and have lamented its loss ever since.

What’s worse is it bled out of the digital world and into the physical. There’s a real lack of color in our modern world, at least over here in the US. Everything is so neutral and boring, all in the name of efficiency.

▲

rickcarlino 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And while they are at it, I hope they give us our scrollbars back. They seem to shrink by one pixel every year...

▲

anal_reactor 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Minimalism does have its merits though. When decorating my apartment I looked for ways to use color without making whole thing look like confetti poop.

▲

thewebguyd 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah I'll agree there, as the saying goes "all things in moderation." It's when it goes too far is when it starts to suck the life and human-ness out of everything.

I suppose my issue is more with the "corporate minimalism" trend rather than minimalist design in general.

	▲	anal_reactor 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think good minimalism is when you express more with less. In my living room, the appliances are grey but wall artworks are colorful - you immediately look the paintings, not at the drawers. The artworks themselves aren't colorful, each one has a specific color scheme, so that when you take a step back, a pattern emerges, and there are gentle but clear color zones that serve different purposes. In another area I have space that's exclusively grey and white, and then there's one corner that's unicorn puke. Minimalism creates lower lows so that the highs punch even higher. The house is modern-minimalist and you can easily find angles to take photos literally from Ikea catalogue, but at the same time it's very radical from artistic point of view and nobody who's seen my house has said that it looks bland. The problem with corporate minimalism is that the vague nothingness became the goal of the design rather than a way to set the scene for something else. It's like asking your audience to stop the chatter but then there's no show.

▲

WD-42 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I hope so. I fancy myself pretty decent at reading. I see the Japanese sites and marvel at the amount of information they have available at a glance. I’m so sick of having to scroll 5 page lengths on western sites just to get to any meaningful information.

▲

gdubs 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd say more of a rejection of a certain kind of millennial Instagram scented candle branding minimalism.

▲

mghackerlady 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I know I certainly am. I hope we move towards things having colors other than white and black again. Please give me back grey backgrounds, I don't like the blinding whites everything has but dark mode is horrid when you aren't in a dark-ish environment

▲

Cthulhu_ 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe it's just a slow design trend, these things come and go.

▲

ghusto 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hopefully. Everyone copied Apple without pausing to consider; "hey, does this make things _less_ usable?". Hint: yes, yes it does.

	▲	WorldPeas 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And now they're following Apple into maximalism again making it even less usable. As someone who did accessibility, minimalism did make it easier, it's hard to do maximalism right, one needs to use component extension and extensive styling rules for overlaps and bounding boxes versus a simple vector rectangle with revolved corners. I do miss the 2000s steel/gradient/font/faux 3d icewm-ish looks, they were pretty easy to pull off and didn't really hinder usability

▲

eudamoniac 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it's more of a grey/beige fatigue.