[jamalaramala]

Oh my god, this is ugly as fuck.

It reminds me a study about the perception of beauty among students of arts.

Before they start their studies, their perception of beauty is similar to everyone's.

But as they go through their course, their perception starts to shift. What they see as "beautiful" doesn't match the perception of others.

They learn what "skeuomorphism" is, and suddenly everything must be flat and undifferentiated.

[sorcerer-mar]

Christopher Alexander’s “Notes on the Synthesis of Form” blames this phenomenon for the crimes of architecture schools of late.

He calls it a craft becoming “self-conscious,” i.e. the architect’s role is not to create a place to live, but to be an architect, which necessarily entails “competing” against other architects. Nobody wins design competitions by creating the 1000th example of a tried and true form, they do it by pushing the boundaries of other architects’ sensibilities, which are already far afield of a normal person’s. Most results are therefore complete garbage.

[vasusen]

I agree, this looks like designers showing off to other designers. It looks suspiciously similar to Dropbox's 2017 design system that thankfully never became mainstream -- https://www.awwwards.com/inspiration/dropbox-design-system

[notpushkin]

The only thing I see on the Awwwards page is the GIF of Sharp Grotesk font family, which is used on Dropbox homepage. dropbox.design doesn’t open for me, so I’m not sure about other elements of their redesign.

[wisty]

I think it's actually less flat, with more affordances (though not quite skeuomorphic).

Basically "oops we made it too flat, let's make those buttons big and colourful so people can see them again". It's a step forward after two steps back.

[Groxx]

It's worth comparing to where it came from: https://m1.material.io/

v3 is flatter than the flat design that v1 was a reaction against because it had such bad affordances.

[jpalawaga]

tbf, mature tastes are often different. it's not good or bad, it's just different. for example, people who drink a lot of old red wines have developed a taste for it.

yes, it drags people away from the mean, but that doesn't stop large segments of the population from acquiring certain tastes (e.g. coffee).

as a long-time user of tech devices, your tastes too have been dragged in certain ways, even if you couch yourself as an average user.

fwiw. i love android, but I do not really care for their current design direction.

(by the way, you might want to look up skeumorphism. material isn't skeumorphic, almost by intention.

[hellonoko]

> It reminds me a study about the perception of beauty among students of arts.

Do you know which particular study this was? I would like to read it.

[iammrpayments]

I don’t think is ugly, it is just that it feels like every trendy company webpage copied and pasted the same design:

http://shopify.com/ https://tailwindcss.com/

[Liquix]

“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”

- Dōgen