While a tad dismissive, this article Light Mode, Dark Mode, and Gen-Z Mode goes into the counter idea that, actually, minimalism is already a stylistic fad on its way out, with the aging...
While a tad dismissive, this article Light Mode, Dark Mode, and Gen-Z Mode goes into the counter idea that, actually, minimalism is already a stylistic fad on its way out, with the aging millennials it’s last torchbearers as the zoomers embrace chaos. And genuinely, popular design among those born after 2000 seems to follow these paths.
So while it may be out of the frying pan, into the fire, in terms of chaos and complexity in website design!
Consider the larger picture here. Given the dwindling resources on the planet like oil and natural gas, and given the damage we as a species have already caused to our climate and environment, I...
Consider the larger picture here. Given the dwindling resources on the planet like oil and natural gas, and given the damage we as a species have already caused to our climate and environment, I think minimalism should be the natural course of action for us as a society in future. It's not about the preferences of us old millennials or what gen-z prefers, it's about the survival and betterment of the human race as a whole, and that's where minimalism (as a philosophy) plays a vital role.
The philosophy of minimalism is not the same thing as the design style which bears the same name. The philosophical concept isn't relevant to anything you mention. It makes no difference to the...
The philosophy of minimalism is not the same thing as the design style which bears the same name. The philosophical concept isn't relevant to anything you mention.
It makes no difference to the planet whether a web page has a tonne of randomly placed buttons and colours or it's all tucked away behind a flat hamburger menu. Perhaps The Kids want to have some fun and colour around in their virtual spaces precisely because the real world is such a mess.
Also, for what it's worth, I'm not sure that designing interiors in the same way will help much either. You can't build a minimalist kitchen (the picture used in the article @stu2b50 links is not minimal, it's just monochrome) using reused/found/upcycled materials, because they are necessarily all different and that's not really compatible with the style. But the latter is a much more environmentally friendly solution.
Minimising resource use is a great idea, but it's not a design style. You can go all 90s zany (which is what all the hyper-modern stuff is, essentially) and still reduce energy costs just fine.
I was gonna say, most of GenZ asthetic just reminds me of the good old AIM, Geocities, and Myspace days. Except now a lot of it is monetized by microtransactions. One one hand, hopefully its more...
I was gonna say, most of GenZ asthetic just reminds me of the good old AIM, Geocities, and Myspace days.
Except now a lot of it is monetized by microtransactions. One one hand, hopefully its more sustainable without trying to sell ads, bit on the other I mourn the commercialization of expressing oneself.
Playing devil's advocate (because I mostly agree): We (as in me and other post-gen-z generations) don't have much to tell gen-z when it comes to protecting the environment since the results will...
Playing devil's advocate (because I mostly agree): We (as in me and other post-gen-z generations) don't have much to tell gen-z when it comes to protecting the environment since the results will affect younger people more and all recent efforts to make a change where pushed by gen-z-ish activism. They're not the problem.
Further, this reminds me of an admittedly rather cynical article I read about the push for "recycling" by major brands. Think Mc-Fucking-Donalds printing a cool "pls recycle me!" icon at the side of their 12 layers of plastic wrapping and calling it a day. We blame people for leaving their LED lamps on when leaving the kitchen or buying a new pair of sneakers, meanwhile a billion-dollar-corporation is pumping an additional gigaton of CO2 into the atmosphere because that's making some factory run 1% cheaper. A funny GIF on a website and whatever the fuck a gen-z might find funny doesn't even make a dent on the state of our environment. Meanwhile, the most absurdly bloated websites out there are mostly boomer central with the processing power of a 1995 Pixar render farm being spent on loading some facebook widget.
In this vein, I was gonna start writing yet-another 'Get Javascript out of the web' topic. I think that will do a lot more net good than striving for minimal UIs everywhere. Heck, one giant...
In this vein, I was gonna start writing yet-another 'Get Javascript out of the web' topic. I think that will do a lot more net good than striving for minimal UIs everywhere. Heck, one giant cluttered UI that puts everything 1 click away would use less resources, but I digress.
You can still use HTML-only Gmail, even if you disable Javascript entirely. It works well enough despite not being updated significantly in a decade. This tells me most apps could function without Javascript, but we've lied to ourselves enough to say that running swaths of client-side code to render an article is the only way.
I know where you're coming from, if we could magically go back and do it over again it'd probably be nice to draw a technically meaningful line between web (application platform) and web (content...
I know where you're coming from, if we could magically go back and do it over again it'd probably be nice to draw a technically meaningful line between web (application platform) and web (content platform), but I think most of the real issues are UX problems that rest on poor incentives, and without fixing that root issue I don't know how much will really change. Life finds a way, and all that...
A lot of modern news pages are nothing short of horrifying in terms of ads vs usability, but I don't think that cutting away the JS bloat would do a significant amount to solve that when you can do so many similarly awful things with static content markup, for example. On the other side of the aisle, Gmail's HTML mode support is cool, but the default Gmail JS app has never given me any problems either and the HTML version is slower and more limited - so I'm not really sure what it gains outside of some incredibly niche use cases? And then you've got the third vertical, things like Pixlr that just wouldn't be plausible at all without JS but would be unfortunate to lose.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that technically competent companies with good design would still make decent pages without JS, companies who want to ram as many ads in your face as possible would still do so without JS, and if we still wanted to support web apps with a separation between content mode and apps mode, you'd just see advertisers forcing users onto the latter.
I know Google Sheets/Drive/Docs has a nasty tendency to break on Firefox periodically if you don't set your UserAgent to Chrome. These are good examples of webapps, to be sure...but TBH their main...
I know Google Sheets/Drive/Docs has a nasty tendency to break on Firefox periodically if you don't set your UserAgent to Chrome.
These are good examples of webapps, to be sure...but TBH their main usefulness is that there isn't a good standard for doing real-time document editing and sharing the way there is email.
I use Drive/etc several times a week on Firefox without changing UserAgent and have never had an issue. Anecdotes, etc. Maybe I wasn't doing the thing that causes the problem.
I know Google Sheets/Drive/Docs has a nasty tendency to break on Firefox periodically if you don't set your UserAgent to Chrome.
I use Drive/etc several times a week on Firefox without changing UserAgent and have never had an issue. Anecdotes, etc. Maybe I wasn't doing the thing that causes the problem.
Modern Gmail is certainly a stinking heap of bloat, however... in a simple test, it was still faster for me to load the webapp and navigate my messages using AJAX than it was to use legacy Gmail...
Modern Gmail is certainly a stinking heap of bloat, however... in a simple test, it was still faster for me to load the webapp and navigate my messages using AJAX than it was to use legacy Gmail and wait for a page load every time I click something. And since Gmail sits in a pinned tab for me, that upfront cost is quickly amortized throughout the day.
I feel that JS is best when sprinkled on, but I also use it all the time for optimizations and enhancements, and loading partial data like an email body seems like as good a use case as any.
Tildes is another example. I'd be rather annoyed if the page reloaded when I clicked this Post Comment button! JS makes the user experience smoother, and manages to do so in a fairly light package.
Thats true, its preloading pretty much everything in the background. If I was on a metered connection though, I wouldn't want Gmail preloading every single unread message to speed up response...
Thats true, its preloading pretty much everything in the background. If I was on a metered connection though, I wouldn't want Gmail preloading every single unread message to speed up response time.
If responsiveness is my primary concern, well that's what native apps are for. The lack of interoperability necessitating webapps is an exercise left to the reader. I look forward to an API-first web which would hopefully allow easier third-party clients to stuff.
Tildes I manually refresh after posting anyway, to insure I've grabbed any posts that were posted while I typed my replies.
I know it's tongue-in-cheek but that article genuinely helped me connect some dots, lol. Thing is: I think I understand the Gen-Z aesthetic building blocks and IMO they're more "minimalist" than...
I know it's tongue-in-cheek but that article genuinely helped me connect some dots, lol.
Thing is: I think I understand the Gen-Z aesthetic building blocks and IMO they're more "minimalist" than it seems. It's basically brutalist webdesign with varying amounts of color depending on whether you're feeling more Balenciaga or H&M. Some of these basically are raw, 90s HTML but there might be a 3D animation spinning in front of it all eating half your CPU. The difference is, the 3D animation eating half your CPU is a joke, it will have gone out of style within a week and the actual interface is a normal fucking button and maybe a funny font, not 5MB of javascript downloading some bloated UI and a beg for a facebook like.
While a tad dismissive, this article Light Mode, Dark Mode, and Gen-Z Mode goes into the counter idea that, actually, minimalism is already a stylistic fad on its way out, with the aging millennials it’s last torchbearers as the zoomers embrace chaos. And genuinely, popular design among those born after 2000 seems to follow these paths.
So while it may be out of the frying pan, into the fire, in terms of chaos and complexity in website design!
Consider the larger picture here. Given the dwindling resources on the planet like oil and natural gas, and given the damage we as a species have already caused to our climate and environment, I think minimalism should be the natural course of action for us as a society in future. It's not about the preferences of us old millennials or what gen-z prefers, it's about the survival and betterment of the human race as a whole, and that's where minimalism (as a philosophy) plays a vital role.
The philosophy of minimalism is not the same thing as the design style which bears the same name. The philosophical concept isn't relevant to anything you mention.
It makes no difference to the planet whether a web page has a tonne of randomly placed buttons and colours or it's all tucked away behind a flat hamburger menu. Perhaps The Kids want to have some fun and colour around in their virtual spaces precisely because the real world is such a mess.
Also, for what it's worth, I'm not sure that designing interiors in the same way will help much either. You can't build a minimalist kitchen (the picture used in the article @stu2b50 links is not minimal, it's just monochrome) using reused/found/upcycled materials, because they are necessarily all different and that's not really compatible with the style. But the latter is a much more environmentally friendly solution.
Minimising resource use is a great idea, but it's not a design style. You can go all 90s zany (which is what all the hyper-modern stuff is, essentially) and still reduce energy costs just fine.
I was gonna say, most of GenZ asthetic just reminds me of the good old AIM, Geocities, and Myspace days.
Except now a lot of it is monetized by microtransactions. One one hand, hopefully its more sustainable without trying to sell ads, bit on the other I mourn the commercialization of expressing oneself.
Playing devil's advocate (because I mostly agree): We (as in me and other post-gen-z generations) don't have much to tell gen-z when it comes to protecting the environment since the results will affect younger people more and all recent efforts to make a change where pushed by gen-z-ish activism. They're not the problem.
Further, this reminds me of an admittedly rather cynical article I read about the push for "recycling" by major brands. Think Mc-Fucking-Donalds printing a cool "pls recycle me!" icon at the side of their 12 layers of plastic wrapping and calling it a day. We blame people for leaving their LED lamps on when leaving the kitchen or buying a new pair of sneakers, meanwhile a billion-dollar-corporation is pumping an additional gigaton of CO2 into the atmosphere because that's making some factory run 1% cheaper. A funny GIF on a website and whatever the fuck a gen-z might find funny doesn't even make a dent on the state of our environment. Meanwhile, the most absurdly bloated websites out there are mostly boomer central with the processing power of a 1995 Pixar render farm being spent on loading some facebook widget.
In this vein, I was gonna start writing yet-another 'Get Javascript out of the web' topic. I think that will do a lot more net good than striving for minimal UIs everywhere. Heck, one giant cluttered UI that puts everything 1 click away would use less resources, but I digress.
You can still use HTML-only Gmail, even if you disable Javascript entirely. It works well enough despite not being updated significantly in a decade. This tells me most apps could function without Javascript, but we've lied to ourselves enough to say that running swaths of client-side code to render an article is the only way.
I know where you're coming from, if we could magically go back and do it over again it'd probably be nice to draw a technically meaningful line between web (application platform) and web (content platform), but I think most of the real issues are UX problems that rest on poor incentives, and without fixing that root issue I don't know how much will really change. Life finds a way, and all that...
A lot of modern news pages are nothing short of horrifying in terms of ads vs usability, but I don't think that cutting away the JS bloat would do a significant amount to solve that when you can do so many similarly awful things with static content markup, for example. On the other side of the aisle, Gmail's HTML mode support is cool, but the default Gmail JS app has never given me any problems either and the HTML version is slower and more limited - so I'm not really sure what it gains outside of some incredibly niche use cases? And then you've got the third vertical, things like Pixlr that just wouldn't be plausible at all without JS but would be unfortunate to lose.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that technically competent companies with good design would still make decent pages without JS, companies who want to ram as many ads in your face as possible would still do so without JS, and if we still wanted to support web apps with a separation between content mode and apps mode, you'd just see advertisers forcing users onto the latter.
I know Google Sheets/Drive/Docs has a nasty tendency to break on Firefox periodically if you don't set your UserAgent to Chrome.
These are good examples of webapps, to be sure...but TBH their main usefulness is that there isn't a good standard for doing real-time document editing and sharing the way there is email.
I use Drive/etc several times a week on Firefox without changing UserAgent and have never had an issue. Anecdotes, etc. Maybe I wasn't doing the thing that causes the problem.
It hasn't happened in awhile, but often enough in the past 8 years that I just perpetually leave a chrome UA for it.
Modern Gmail is certainly a stinking heap of bloat, however... in a simple test, it was still faster for me to load the webapp and navigate my messages using AJAX than it was to use legacy Gmail and wait for a page load every time I click something. And since Gmail sits in a pinned tab for me, that upfront cost is quickly amortized throughout the day.
I feel that JS is best when sprinkled on, but I also use it all the time for optimizations and enhancements, and loading partial data like an email body seems like as good a use case as any.
Tildes is another example. I'd be rather annoyed if the page reloaded when I clicked this Post Comment button! JS makes the user experience smoother, and manages to do so in a fairly light package.
Thats true, its preloading pretty much everything in the background. If I was on a metered connection though, I wouldn't want Gmail preloading every single unread message to speed up response time.
If responsiveness is my primary concern, well that's what native apps are for. The lack of interoperability necessitating webapps is an exercise left to the reader. I look forward to an API-first web which would hopefully allow easier third-party clients to stuff.
Tildes I manually refresh after posting anyway, to insure I've grabbed any posts that were posted while I typed my replies.
I know it's tongue-in-cheek but that article genuinely helped me connect some dots, lol.
Thing is: I think I understand the Gen-Z aesthetic building blocks and IMO they're more "minimalist" than it seems. It's basically brutalist webdesign with varying amounts of color depending on whether you're feeling more Balenciaga or H&M. Some of these basically are raw, 90s HTML but there might be a 3D animation spinning in front of it all eating half your CPU. The difference is, the 3D animation eating half your CPU is a joke, it will have gone out of style within a week and the actual interface is a normal fucking button and maybe a funny font, not 5MB of javascript downloading some bloated UI and a beg for a facebook like.