[beefman]

Why is lowering the information density of everything now considered good design? Wikipedia's typography update a couple weeks ago brought increased line spacing and it really sucks. Facebook used to have a great information-rich design but went to 'cards' earlier this year and now I can see about 2.5 posts at a time (at 1200 lines). Medium and all the rest with their giant, bold fonts, 90+ chars per line etc. tell us that the computing audience today is expected to be mentally challenged, using some kind of handheld casino gaming device, or both. It's a sad world to wake up in for those of us who love computing.

Then there's OkCupid's question interface. The gateway to the greatest survey of all time is now more low-density crap. And somebody thought a pulldown (a custom one with its own quirky behavior, at that) was a good substitute for radio buttons.

I guess it's not surprising when you consider what the design community talks about. They don't measure anything that would let them detect a loss of computing power. They don't think about cybernetics or cognitive psychology. It's all "affordances" and other stuff that sounds like it was overheard in a 60s-era art gallery.

I can imagine a satirical redesign of the violin. They're so hard to use... Except it's too late. Only a tiny fraction of people appreciate violin music now. Such redesigns have been proposed in earnest! Shelves at electronic music departments are filled with the prototypes. Only problem: the music people made with them sucks.