My opinion about flat design, hidden for convenience since it is not entirely on-topic.
I absolutely _dislike_ flat design. It ■■■■■■ me off to no end because it seems like a lazy excuse for being lazy. People spend all this time and money on learning how to use the best media creation tools on the planet... only to make basic geometric shapes in basic colours.Like why bother? It makes going for that Adobe Creative Cloud license a waste if you can’t even embrace the gradient tool. Most logos I can re-create in ten minutes or less by eye. And worse yet, flat design limits options. There is a time and place for it, sure, but for logos and brand images? I really don’t see why more effort should shouldn’t be put into it.
Now, I am not asking for masterpieces. But I am also asking for design to not be so boring. Yet, everything I use feels like a child made its imagery. I remember the days when Windows didn’t look like I was staring at a piece of paper. I remember when it was glass and transparency, and using that system was fun. Maybe this is why I have a fondness for open-source system design, because it’s not locked down and I can have some fun with my system’s appearance.
But before people say I am opposing my previous arguments with keeping it ugly, I’m not. I say I want fun, but I am meaning fun for fun sake. At the end of the day if my attempts at making the system look svelte and swish turn out to be slop, I’ll revert to “Ugly” any time I want to actually get something done. If Terminal looks so pretty I don’t know what I am doing, I’ll swap to a more basic theme in zsh
if it means I can get my head straight. If my desktop theme preference somehow interferes with something else, then I’ll go with a more stoic appearance. And at the end of the day, maybe this is why flat design had been adopted globally.
Not that anyone should adapt to a standard, but for cohesion flat design works. I hate it to pieces but I cannot ignore the results. Most developers are not designers of high fashion, they make jigs and use hand tools for crafting what we put our heads under, so they might not have the fashion sense nor the ambition of creating something beautiful after swinging hammers and drilling screws all day.
There is also the issue of stock designs being used; you can recognize the same image being used in a multitude of programs because lazy developers who do not hire a design firm for the most basic of things will just recycle something which already exists, if they can get away with it. A lot of flat design is cost-effective and can be made in a timely fashion. But it also feels so beta and lazy, like I am staring at a bunch of placeholders for something with more colour, more punch and more wow in a graphical desktop.
But just a little bit. This is why I am fine with the MATE desktop and the default Ambiance design. Everything in it is recognizable, but not over-the-top. But if I want the option to screw around and make that happen, I can have it… to a limited extent; Since the failure of ARGB in GTK2, alpha everywhere isn’t an option otherwise we’d see glass GNOME themes which doesn’t require anything drastic to make happen. While I am fine with it, I really wish GNOME team would commit to making that possibility of design more of a reality than it already is for other people who would be alright rocking something like that 24 / 7.
If moderation staff wants to split the above into a “Why I hate flat design” topic, I’ll modify the above so it isn’t hidden. I only did so because I wanted to get that off my chest.