[deergomoo]

I am still very sad that the point we started getting high-DPI displays everywhere was about the same time we decided to throw away rich icons and detail in UIs in favour of abstract line art and white-on-white windows.

Maybe it was on purpose? Those fancy textures and icons are probably a lot more expensive to produce when they have to look good with 4x the pixels.

iOS 4 on an iPhone 4 and OS X whatever-it-was that was on the initial retina MacBook Pros are still very clear in my memory. Everything looked so good it made you want to use the device just for the hell of it.

[mattkevan]

It’s because the higher the resolution, the worse those kinds of design effects look. It’s why they’re not much used in print design and look quite tacky when they are.

At low resolutions you need quite heavy-handed effects to provide enough contrast between elements, but on better displays you can be much more subtle.

It’s also why fonts like Verdana, which were designed to be legible on low resolution displays, don’t look great in print and aren’t used much on retina interfaces.

[bartread]

The font point aside, which I do agree with, the rest of your comment sounds very subjective to me.

I too prefer more distinction between different UI elements than is fashionable in recent years - and, make no mistake, that’s all it is: fashion - and don’t see why higher resolutions preclude that. That’s not to say we have to ape what was done 10 or 15 years ago, but we can certainly take things in a more interesting and usable direction than we’ve chosen to do since around 2013.

I find myself clicking the wrong window by mistake a lot more frequently than I did back in the day due, I think, to current design trends.

[II2II]

I don't understand why the effects would look worse at higher resolution, or why how they add contrast. The tacky part I do understand, as well as the point about screen fonts like Verdana.

To choose a relevant counter example: the Macintosh System Software prior to version 7 was also very flat. System 7 to 7.5.5 introduced depth in a subtle way and a limited manner. It was only around System 7.6 when they started being heavy handed, something that I always attributed to following the trends in other operating systems.

[mattkevan]

It’s because at higher resolutions you can see the flaws more easily.

They’d have to be implemented perfectly every time, otherwise the whole thing becomes a mess. Not everyone will bother to do this.

Also, often when creating designs, things look better the more you take away rather than add.

[vintagedave]

There are a couple of places where macOS still has Aqua-style icons. Not sure I should name them in case someone sees this and removes them, but... eh... set up a VPN but leave the credentials blank so you're prompted when you connect: that dialog has a beautiful icon.

It looks _just fine_ on a Retina display.

When Retina displays were introduced with the iPhone 4, gel-style iOS also looked just fine.

In print, we're interacting with paper and a fake reflective style looks odd. On a computer, we're interacting with glass and something reflective or high-detail feels very suitable. It matches the look to the medium.

[cesarb]

> the point we started getting high-DPI displays everywhere was about the same time we decided to throw away rich icons and detail in UIs in favour of abstract line art and white-on-white windows.

I might have an alternative explanation.

I often think about something I saw, a long time ago, on one of those print magazines about house decoration, which also featured sample house blueprints. That particular issue had a blueprint for a house which would be built on a terrain which already had a large boulder. Instead of removing the boulder, the house was built around it; it became part of the house, and guided its layout.

In the same way, the restrictions we had back then (lower display resolutions, reduced color palette, pointing device optional) helped guide the UI design. Once these restrictions were lifted, we lost that guidance.

[rubymamis]

> Maybe it was on purpose? Those fancy textures and icons are probably a lot more expensive to produce when they have to look good with 4x the pixels.

That's an interesting observation. If it was indeed on purpose, I wonder whether they were weighting it based on the effort on Apple's designers/developers/battery usage or the effort it would have drawn from 3rd party developers.

[cosmic_cheese]

The stark whiteness of “light mode” colors that’ve become standard since the rise of flat UI is I believe greatly under-credited cause for the increase of popularity of dark mode. Modern light mode UI is not fun to look at even at relatively low screen brightness, whereas the middle-grays it replaced was reasonably easy on the eyes even at high brightness.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

I've also noticed that as screens got larger screen real estate got cheaper so UI design doesn't require as much effort and it shows.

[rrr_oh_man]

Nah, it's because of mobile.

All flat boxes is easier to do with 1,000+ different screen resolutions.

[itomato]

Ah yes, when it hit, one of the first things I did was to replace as much of the Denim and "AquaFresh Stripes" as possible with a flat gray texture.

https://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=26300