[ericmay]

> Now everything is this sad rounded cornered square.

You see this a lot in the absurd “modernist” design of clean lines, sharp edges, and lack of texture and depth across all industries.

Whether that’s your Thuma furniture where the price is high and your marketed to be told that the design is good, but it’s not at all - devoid of meaning and a sense of place, never mind that the quality of the materials are low and have no specific origin, or your run of the mill drone light show where we are fooling ourselves into thinking that drawing pictures of things like the Statue of Liberty (oh after the drones do the ads, brought to you by your local auto dealer) are good and should be appreciated instead of the vibrancy and brilliance of fireworks instead.

Apple has begun to transition this way too. There aren’t any designers working there. Look at the Calculator app as a great example.

They say perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. But there is a point where you take away more and more and more and your left with creations devoid of meaning or purpose.

Once you start seeing this in your day to day life you can’t unsee it. Sorry ahead of time for those who read this comment and become more attune to this phenomenon.

[gyomu]

> Apple has begun to transition this way too. There aren’t any designers working there

This is a dumb “no true Scotsman” argument, there are undoubtedly designers working there by any stretch of the imagination.

The more interesting discussion to have is why the field of software design has come to the point it’s at today, and why many designers think that work like the kind Apple is doing is good design.

[ericmay]

> This is a dumb “no true Scotsman” argument, there are undoubtedly designers working there by any stretch of the imagination.

It’s a rhetorical device, not an argument. Of course there are people with that title working there.

I don’t think it has too much to do with software though, I meant to address a general cultural malaise that we can see (or I can see) surface in design broadly across industries. The software industry (writing code and papers about it and such) is probably, I say as I haven’t really felt the need to commit to an opinion here, one of the better design oriented industries precisely because the design of software, elegant code that is efficient and elastic to demand, reliable, and performant, seems to me to be progressing quite nicely.

But software by its very nature isn’t meant to be superfluous - unlike say, good architecture with ornamentation and carefully selected materials that are adapted for a given environment.

To serve the purpose of an interesting conversation, I don’t think focusing on a rhetorical comment as very important. Maybe engage with the substance (or lack thereof if that’s your opinion) of the content instead? Not to sound like a jerk I don’t mean to - just that it may be more interesting.

[newdee]

I dunno, I kinda like the new icons.