Some good points and I’m all for diversity in interface design where appropriate.
Thing is, for all the crimes that happened in the name of the Web2.0 aesthetic, a useful visual language has emerged that for some use cases, is absolutely right.
Trends come and go, and for a while the whole aqua thing worked while we all had candy-coloured iMacs sat on our desks. Sure it got cheesy and was over-used and looked terrible when executed badly.
But what fell out of that though was some really useful patterns/conventions for (amongst others) buttons that actually looked like buttons, navigation that looked like nav, larger more legible type, good use of whitespace and GUI chrome that gets out the way of content (as it should).
Users have come to learn these references/patterns and they love consistency.
I guess the tricky part is finding balance. Referencing patterns where appropriate and breaking rules where you can. Any design that deviates for the sake of it, isn’t good design if that design creates a headache for users or attempts to reinvent the wheel just because they can.
alex morris
Hey Mike
Some good points and I’m all for diversity in interface design where appropriate.
Thing is, for all the crimes that happened in the name of the Web2.0 aesthetic, a useful visual language has emerged that for some use cases, is absolutely right.
Trends come and go, and for a while the whole aqua thing worked while we all had candy-coloured iMacs sat on our desks. Sure it got cheesy and was over-used and looked terrible when executed badly.
But what fell out of that though was some really useful patterns/conventions for (amongst others) buttons that actually looked like buttons, navigation that looked like nav, larger more legible type, good use of whitespace and GUI chrome that gets out the way of content (as it should).
Users have come to learn these references/patterns and they love consistency.
I guess the tricky part is finding balance. Referencing patterns where appropriate and breaking rules where you can. Any design that deviates for the sake of it, isn’t good design if that design creates a headache for users or attempts to reinvent the wheel just because they can.