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I am in design field more than 20 years. The minimalism trend is just another way of lowering the cost for manufacturing. Thats all. Designers that are capable of producing long-term value are scarce and expensive. Companies treat design as "Marketing Decoration" and lowering the standard for the profession has produced hordes of technically capable designers that don't have deep knowledge of the subject. There is no time to learn the foundations. There is no time to explore possibilities. Just apply "best practices" and call it a day. The end result is homogeneity on a mass scale and lack of individuality. The anti-design and dark patterns trends are so strong, that in near future design will be successfully generated by AI like systems. Tech founders are design biased, they hide this behind terms as "accessibility", "inclusive design", "design testing", etc. This is a direct result of "thinking big" culture - Design for big audience, big VC, big "success" and mass adoption, before you know your audience at all. Design is measured today by "market value" and judging by the designers salaries - frontend devs are more valuable than skilled design professional. So, this is what you get by paying less. In my business I cannot give quality without being payed for the effort. I have dedicated my life to become skilled professional. There is no incentive to apply expertise and knowledge, when you know that your work will be measured as "cultural fit".
To make a counter-argument: I previously worked at a larger e-commerce company with a very strong design department. Working with the design team was not always easy because they had their own ideas about what customers wanted/prefer. They also had their own ideas about what is morally acceptable to implement and what is not. Within the company, they almost had their own culture. As a result, we had no "dark patterns," which was a good thing.

In some cases, however, it became clear that their design/aesthetics thinking was more important to them than user experience. For example, when we displayed prices on mobile devices, we did not include a CTA. My team persuaded them to conduct a simple A/B test on mobile with an arrow button next to prices. As a result, conversion increased by 10%. People simply did not realize they could continue to the next step by clicking on the price. The design team despised the button, but it enabled customers to complete their tasks on our website.

Example: This is a company with 13 million funding, without budget to spend on design:

While the team is still less than ~20 ppl, we likely won't have a full-time designer. With the ubiquity of tools like Figma and design libraries like Material Design, we actually think this is okay. You're welcome to hire an agency to help with things like colors, fonts, illustrations, and to audit our component library.

Agency? To help? May be more like "some freelancers and stock design templates". Good Lord. And then you have audacity to complain that "there is no design".

> judging by the designers salaries - frontend devs are more valuable than skilled design professional. So, this is what you get by paying less.

Why should frontend devs be not paid more than designers? Many frontend devs have dedicated significant numbers of years to become skilled professionals, just like you.

Great article up until the end, where they just have to include that gotcha "By the way, this is all the white man's fault!" I think it's just the opposite: FAANG companies are now scrambling over each other to hire minorities, and their design languages get more and more stripped down by the year. One of the worst offenders being that round, colorful, soulless people art that everyone and their mother's startup uses on their landing pages because it's "diverse" and "inclusive".

Stop injecting race into everything and start looking at the bigger picture. Big tech corporations that don't give a fuck about you are driving these design movements.

> FAANG companies are now scrambling over each other to hire minorities

Citation needed

I actually suspect that private companies love minimalism because it's cheap. Consider icons, for example - it's faster to create a gray outline than a nice, colorful piece of pixel art.

And this has been a trend for a century or so, since Modernism. My apartment house in Prague, built 130 years ago, has a decorative (blacksmith-made) railings at the stairs. Today something like that would be ridiculously expensive, and it would never get made for an ordinary middle-class house.

Exactly. If you were to take one of Europe's cathedrals, you can spend 10 years looking at decorations and statues and still discover new things, scenes and details. Every last little detail is thought out, and contributes to the whole of the effect.

They also generally took a fraction of the resources of an entire city for 2-8 centuries to build.

I have a suspicion this is partly because the ordinary middle class are poorer today, comparatively.

We have more stuff, but it's lower quality. Anything built to last is beyond what many can afford. And there are structural reasons why it doesn't make sense to buy built-to-last items: nobody repairs them any more. You could save money and buy one or two really good pairs of shoes, like your great-grandparents probably did. But cobblers and shoe repair shops are doing out.

Instead of saving a month's wages for a pair of shoes that would last many years, it's easier to spend a day's wages on something that will wear out within a year. Plus, of course, you might be able to buy several pairs in multiple styles! Woop! More variety, more sales, more landfill.

Fashion à la môde, indeed.

I think it's exactly the same with iron railings. It's similar with domestic appliances, most consumer goods, food, etc etc.

I don't think this is correct, at least for graphic designers. I don't know about you but all the designers I know would gladly show you pages and pages of pixel-pushed, pixel-perfect designs.

But those don't easily scale to different dpi and layout sizes. There are non-standard ways but nothing has taken over. So flat icons and solid colors it is.

That could definitely be the case for physical items since the production cost increases with the design complexity however is it really cheaper when you don't have to produce it beyond the design itself?

Maybe it could be argued that it could be cheaper for a sweatshop that profits per artworks produced per second per designer however non-sweatshop made designs are also quite often minimalist.

Pixel art is actually very easy and cheap to create, even cheaper than a vector icon of the same resolution/color depth. The issue is that it doesn't easily lead to pixel-perfect rendering at any resolution; there are good resampling algorithms but they work in fixed steps like 2x or 3x.
My website is minimal because I have no graphic design talent whatsoever.
Icons are an interesting use case; I think they are made to be scalable and recognizable from a 16x16px favicon, regular sized website logo, various sized app icons, and massive billboard sized.

I mean I've got a DHL track&trace tab open and its icon looks like a red line in a yellow square, so they haven't designed a recognizable new logo yet for that use case. HN / YC's icon is much better in that regard. Github is also open and that too is quite recognizable.

Good UI design focuses on reducing visual noise in order to help people use the interface. Occasionally they go too far, and I would argue that decoration can be an important part in differentiating parts of a design for the viewer ( a touch of class, as it were ).
I'm not sure how much this applies to web design but the reason for non-ornate standard banisters and what not is mass production. The population was much smaller and far fewer houses being built 130 years ago. Artisan manufacturing doesn't scale.
But this doesn't explain why companies would replace icons that they already have with minimalist icons. That's an additional expense, no matter how small.
I think there is quite a difference between minimalism and simplicity which is often confused (also by designers themselves).

Simplicity done right is really about focusing on the core idea and removing anything not related to that. This can feel like a “minimalist aesthetic” which others attempt to copy but is actually something completely different.

I’m working on generative coding art. One thing I like about it is how having to literally “code” your art enforces already an initial formalization of the shapes in the work.

Check out here to see some of it: https://hyperobjects.design/gallery/genuary-collection

Cannot get past the blinking eye for some reason. I use Firefox
If they can't be bothered to check on Firefox I won't waste my time reading their material.
Same. Workarounds don't appear to be available on mobile. On one hand, it's hilariously meta; on the other hand, I can't even go into the arguably minimalist reader mode

edit: well, outline.com gets at the prose, anyway https://outline.com/DRXrCu

Me too. For a moment there, I even thought it was a joke on minimalism.
Run this in the console:

  document.body.classList.remove('preload');
Another Firefox user chiming in. I had the blinking eye at first, but refreshed the page and it appeared immediately.

This anti-pattern of loading your actual page content asynchronously needs to go away.

same... and i don't care anymore. sloppy programming.
Workaround:

View -> Page Style -> No Style

Minimalism is the most difficult design style.

- It's easy to end up with something that looks unfinished, unintentional or lazy

- If you over-simplify, the design loses character, like the uniform sans style critiqued in the article

But consider good minimalist design like the Nike logo. When it's done well it can be amazingly timeless.

Design has become mass-produced at an internet scale. Minimalism was introduced to better deal with - vector design tools - visual stability across multiple sizes, including small/tiny smartphone app icons.

We are likely going to see a counter reaction. But this trend had lots of practical and technical reasons to exist - we needed very small icons and illustrations that would be readable even in small sizes, and we needed to produce more design using vector graphics tools.

The idea of blaming some company or another is easy thinking.

I work in the area and “flat” and “minimalism” are just ways to speed things up and make them more legible. This article just has an agenda.

“Design has always loved minimalism” isn’t even a true thing to say. There are plenty of designers particularly in the 90s who were maximalists - look at print design during this era, look at stuff from Paula Scher and look at any design mag from the 90s to see Photoshop insanity, distorted and cut up fonts. Lots of other eras had similar ideas - look at the 1950s illustrated magazine ads, the 1980s use of photography, Toulouse Latrec’s poster design.

But looking at magazine design in the 90s this was again a technical/practical design innovation - Photoshop and desktop publishing had become real alongside digital printing, so suddenly you had the opportunity to do anything and print anything. So the end result was an explosion in garish absurdity, some of it quite interesting.

Design and art styles are fads. As soon as minimalism becomes oversaturated, and it already is, people will shift to another art movement. No need to panic, it has happened before, it will happen again.

Articles like this one are actually what will drive the shift towards adopting new art styles.

Whole point of design is not to be bundled together with art.

Good design strives towards a more engineering/problem solving approach - finding solutions to identified problems.

This is why the article is kinda whatever - design with ornamentation or doodads is not design.

One issue I see is that all the new cloud-friendly UI design apps seem to be very oriented towards flat design, so doing anything else may be an uphill battle.
As long as free markets, open societies and capitalism are not merely the tools to achieve prosperity but serve as guiding values, there is no going back to the kind of beauty we once took for granted, and which you can see & feel in every old town part of ancient cities.

The current aesthetics are derived from applying the following optimization functions:

- cost: cheap / simple / flat is preferred over elaborate / ornate / pleasant

- power relations: megacorps and their necessarily globalist lowest-common-denominator taste determine what artists/graphic designers/... produce, instead of the singular "soul in the game" creator

- maximal international compatibility of products and services, resulting in a loss of regional diversity and the emergence of interchangeable architecture

- centralisation & accumulation of bureaucratic rules, regulation & power, resulting in regulatory capture / zoning laws / a plethora of second order effects

- increasing credentialism, leading to more things becoming "academic" and thus eliminate craftsmanship and its culture - see the decline of architecture

- joint stock corporations and the principal/agent problems that necessarily come with them, due to decoupling profit from responsibility

Not that the article itself didn't already have some odd takes, to say the least, but I find it a bit ironic that they talk about design with seeming authority when that site has a very strange anti-feature where every few minutes eyeballs pop up on screen—sometimes over the text, making it more difficult to read—and you have to hover the pointer over them to make them go away. It was absolutely terrifying the first time, and quickly got annoying after that.

In hindsight, the eyeballs act like an unintentional warning not to bother reading. And that's despite my agreeing with the initial premise that these flat rebrandings are getting way too common.

That sticky header is really annoying. It is too big, the eye is distracting, and it is not helping much when trying to read the article. Why do I need a progress indicator, when I already have scroll bar?

I mean it looks kinda nice at a first glance, but to people really like that?

Huh? I see very few designs, products, or interfaces with honest “minimalism”.

the ideals of minimalism might be utilised at some stage of the design process, but most often they are quickly abandoned as complexity and scope increase.

I’m disappointed by the last decade of design.

So what are some good examples of recent non-minimalist design?
Speaking of GUIs and such, I would look at computer games. They often have a very distinct style, and have to balance it with the actual need to get stuff done (in game).

For example, I play Factorio quite a bit now, and the UX is a pleasure. The graphic design itself plays only a small role in that, but all the traditional elements, like buttons easy to recognize, ability to have hotkeys, tooltips, highlights, etc. are there.

Hacker News (does that count as recent?), websites https://brutalistwebsites.com/, interior design https://youtu.be/-ApyRpd2tug, indie games https://fantasticarcade.com/games/. So many things. It certainly varies in quality more, for obvious reasons.
I'd be interested in examples of modern, minimalist design systems that put function before form. e.g.: clear separation of actionable vs non-actionable elements, proper links and such.
I can't get into the article and don't want to mess with work-arounds. Did they mention form functionality? Properly placing the cursor in the first place you need to type in a form seems to be a lost art these days both on the web and in some desktop applications. I hate typing something in when the form comes up and no form field is active and having it be lost to the ether. Doubly so if it's a password field.
I think this is what a first rickroll must have felt like.
> What if this recent spate of rebrands, then, is less a passing fad — a lack of creativity among contemporary graphic design — and more a natural endpoint in a profession forever obsessed with simplifying?

These minimalist redesigns are already getting boring. Designers may like minimalism, but they definitely do not like boring, and so they will find styles that are more interesting again.

It's been interesting, and a little concerning to see that the new popular UI design tools don't seem to be capable of much else beyond churning out 'flat' design.

It seems as if we will be relegated to a life of flat UIs that all feel the same for the foreseeable future, just due to vendor lock-in.

It’s not a designer’s problem when it’s the companies themselves that want to blend in with one another.
It's just the current style, it'll change back to high-effort imagery in about 20 years.
No idea, only getting a pastel colored background with a blinking eye, the HTML source is messy enough that I don't want to read the article
I dont know what exactly was the issue, but that page was uncomfortable to read and look at.
judging from the page source it seems that Javascript developers hate minimalism.