by Jason Snell
The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design
Designer Michael Flarup suggests that macOS Big Sur will start the pendulum swinging back away from minimalism and toward richness, across the entire technology industry:
Given the chance of a redesign on the mac, Apple did not choose minimalism as the single guiding design pillar. In fact, they doubled down on expressiveness, added depth, gaussian blur shadows, angled lighting and real lifelike objects. Sure, it’s not consistent and we lost some expressiveness elsewhere (🥃 pour one out for detailed toolbar icons), but generally this is like a green light turning on for more expressiveness and ultimately more fun in visual design. They didn’t just keep this for nostalgia’s sake, they developed it further. They advanced it and are pushing it out to millions of Mac users later this year.
(Via Charles Arthur, who points out that Apple’s new richer design approach is also pretty inconsistent, as one look at the Chess, Disk Utility, and Preview icons will reveal.)