The UI future is colourful and dimensional

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Cyclical Design & Nostalgia

  • Many see the “colourful and dimensional” move as just another swing in a long-running pendulum: skeuomorphism → flat → something in-between → back again.
  • Some describe it as a spiral, not a loop: each swing is a reaction to excesses of the previous era (e.g., flat icons to stop UI overshadowing content, now richer icons reintroduced carefully).
  • Strong nostalgia for late‑90s/early‑00s UIs (Windows 98/2000, Winamp, BeOS, Aqua, Tango icons) as a sweet spot: clear affordances, high information density, and power‑user friendliness.

Flat vs Dimensional: Usability and Affordances

  • Repeated complaints that flat/minimalist design hurts discoverability:
    • Clickable items look like plain text; scrollable regions aren’t signposted; selected windows barely differ from background.
    • Older or less tech‑immersed users struggle to tell what’s interactive.
  • Others defend flatness as cleaner and less visually fatiguing, especially when contrasted with maximalist, attention-grabbing 3D art.
  • Widely shared view: the real issue isn’t 2D vs 3D, but whether controls clearly communicate state, affordances, and hierarchy.

Airbnb Redesign and “Diamorphism” Skepticism

  • Many note that Airbnb’s app is still mostly flat; only a handful of 3D-ish icons changed. Calling this a “landmark redesign” is seen as overblown.
  • Performance complaints (slow, janky, heavy on resources) undercut the pitch that this is a better UX.
  • Several commenters view the article as trend-chasing / branding (“trying to name the next thing”) with little evidence this is an actual industry shift.

AI-Generated UI and Skill / Consistency

  • Mixed reactions to AI’s role:
    • Some see generative tools as great for quickly producing rich icons, as long as humans still curate and enforce consistency.
    • Others argue complex, dimensional systems demand more visual consistency than AI is currently good at; flat systems are easier for tools to match.

Icons, Text, and Information Density

  • Icons are praised when standardized and sparse; heavily detailed, mixed-perspective sets (like the game library example) are criticized as noisy and tiring.
  • Strong support for labels: in many contexts, words beat bespoke pictograms, especially when concepts are abstract or icons unfamiliar.
  • Power users want dense, highly legible interfaces; they resent “lowest common denominator” layouts with huge spacing and few visible items.

Broader Interface Futures & Fast-Fashion Critique

  • Some argue the real future is elsewhere: natural-language interfaces, adaptive UIs, AR/VR, and time-based/“4D” interactions, not icon styling.
  • A recurring thread: UI visual trends behave like fashion. Companies and designers periodically restyle surfaces (flat, 3D, gradients) largely to signal newness, often without improving — and sometimes worsening — actual usability.