[cabalamat]

> They mostly exist because they are convenient, useful, and logical.

What happens, when, in the words of the article, you "Do not be constrained by questions of usability, legibility, and flexibility"?

The answer, it appears, is their re-design of HN: https://interface.fh-potsdam.de/future-retro/HN/ which I find unusable.

[Retric]

That's shockingly bad.

The expanded view with lines between comments and their parents which scroll independently is literally the worst website UI I have ever seen. And I recall some terrible flash abominations.

[zipwitch]

The pure white screen has a certain aesthetic appeal, but the total lack of content puts it considerably below the original. (I assume this must be an intended effect, given the complete absence of error messages.)

[singingboyo]

The medium redesign is also awful. Its inability to handle my portrait-oriented monitor did trigger a sense of childish amusement (truncating POOR to POO) but it's entirely impossible to read anything using it.

[nine_k]

> Do not be constrained by questions of usability, legibility, and flexibility

That is, create a work of art (as opposed to utility). Okay, art is nice, too.

But mixing artistry and utility is quite hard. Designing a nice, livable house, or a store, is a craft. Building fancy sand castles is a (pastime) art. But mixing the fancy free-form with being actually usable by thousands takes lots of work, resources, and time, because what you'd have to build is a cathedral. (If you think modern technology makes it simple, look at the history of building the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.)

[rytill]

Actually wouldn't be terrible if the comments appeared in a more orderly fashion. Right now, they spawn randomly and can even overlap which makes it actually unreadable.

[reaperducer]

I can't imagine what they think someone with disabilities is supposed to do with that.

[cannonedhamster]

They don't care about people with disabilities. They don't even care about people without disabilities. It's not usable for people who are not differently abled.

[greenhatman]

That was a pretty hilarious experience.

[smhost]

the day/night button on the bottom right is genius satire

[Retr0spectrum]

The "redesign" is a joke, right?

[greendestiny_re]

Only an artist could come up with this: http://prntscr.com/lgk7x0

[booleandilemma]

Is this brutalist design?

[anthk]

No, brutalist is HN, lobste.rs or the Oreilly CD Bookshelf. Or any Unix CS guide with those square Motif-like buttons.

[polynomial]

That site could induce a seizure in David Parsons.