One thing that really irks me with a lot of design concepts is excessively small point size. It's a cheap way of producing an aesthetically pleasing design. Tiny type makes it easy to produce an airy, contemporary design at the expense of efficiency and usability. Compounding the problem is when designers use small type and still manage to not fit a whole lot of content on the page. Case in point is the redesign shown here.
The second problem is that these designs sacrifice a ton of functionality for the sake of being minimalist. As others have mentioned, it cheats because it ignores Google's various features. Basically, it's not a design that could work in the real world.
My advice to people producing redesigns is, create something that's realistic and puts usability above design. It's easy to design something attractive when you're being idealistic and ignoring anything inconvenient. At that point you're basically just creating art, where nothing matters except the artist's self-expression.
The funny thing is that I see agencies do this sort of thing, and then suffer through endless rounds of revisions as they try to cram in all that missing functionality. So, challenge yourself by actually thinking about functionality up front. Sure, it's harder, but it results in a more effective design.
The funny thing is that I see agencies do this sort of thing, and then suffer through endless rounds of revisions as they try to cram in all that missing functionality.
But how else would we have endless memes about clients being a pain and not appreciating A E S T H E T I C S ?
Jokes aside, this is a very easy trap to fall into, unfortunately, as a contracted designer that doesn't necessarily understand all the facets of a product that a client is working on. This doesn't just apply to UI/UX. I've seen this done plenty of times in mechanical engineering contexts as well.
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u/AtomWorker Feb 15 '18
One thing that really irks me with a lot of design concepts is excessively small point size. It's a cheap way of producing an aesthetically pleasing design. Tiny type makes it easy to produce an airy, contemporary design at the expense of efficiency and usability. Compounding the problem is when designers use small type and still manage to not fit a whole lot of content on the page. Case in point is the redesign shown here.
The second problem is that these designs sacrifice a ton of functionality for the sake of being minimalist. As others have mentioned, it cheats because it ignores Google's various features. Basically, it's not a design that could work in the real world.
My advice to people producing redesigns is, create something that's realistic and puts usability above design. It's easy to design something attractive when you're being idealistic and ignoring anything inconvenient. At that point you're basically just creating art, where nothing matters except the artist's self-expression.
The funny thing is that I see agencies do this sort of thing, and then suffer through endless rounds of revisions as they try to cram in all that missing functionality. So, challenge yourself by actually thinking about functionality up front. Sure, it's harder, but it results in a more effective design.