What's old is now new again. The fashion industry has known this for decades, and the tech industry is catching up to that.
You know what comes after "dimensional" design? Radicial minimalism.
"Once you strip away everything extra, everything ornamental, what remains is the truth, and nothing more" There, I wrote a tagline for design trend of 2030.
Designers are so out of touch. That whole criticism of Comic Sans is one example. Slowly, I'm coming to the conclusion that designers should never be employed, only consulted on a per-project basis. If they sit around 8 hours a day, they end up changing something or the other to justify their existence. But human beings are not used to change at such a rapid cadence. Humans take time to settle into a design and establish patterns of usage.
Good UI and UX isn't about which icons to use etc, it's about making the user's journey through an app match how they're thinking about the problem.
In my team we spend so much time picking icons, and checking that we are matching the design patterns of other apps (yawn...), that we have just ended up with a UX that doesn't prioritise the number one reason people use our app.
AirBnB's redesign isn't a indicator of design trends changing. Most of the app remains minimal and "flat", the dimensional flares are mixed inconsistently throughout. The app could more easily flop back to fully minimalist than it could into a fully 3d design language.
Also dimensional icons have existed within flat UIs as app icons for quite some time, though some platforms have had periods of both flat icons and UI. In a sense they are adopting them in this existing usage as sub-app icons.
The oddest thing is the glossy "new" tags, they are the only tags within the UI which are glossy. Having them mixed with flat tags and flat buttons is honestly confusing, they look more like buttons than the actual buttons do.
> Back in the early 2000s, UI design like this had a high skill ceiling. It took years to master lighting, materials, and depth. Now? That level of craft is often just a prompt away.
Mastering any design style takes time, and the skill ceiling is not meaningfully different if there even is one. I'm also highly sceptical that AI would be able to be consistent enough whether generating flat or 3d icons.
While this article is a little fluffy and overstated, I do share the overarching sentiment — UIs for the vast majority of products should be at least a little fun.
“Delightful” UI/UX has become a cliché at this point, but it really does make me happy to see an element of craft and intention in the software I use, and stuff like these detailed little icons accomplishes that well!
> It’s not meant to be a grand rebrand of design. A completely invented word. A working title for a style that embraces depth, texture, and light. Not to mimic the real world, but to create something that feels native to the screen. Something expressive. Playful.
I loathe this kind of self serving pseudo humble talk. It's like trying to make or validate something out of its minuscule value.
I don't agree with the author either. If anything Google's material themes have become the defacto trend setter for a while now, and I only know it by the way it "infects" my web usage over time.
Stop letting graphics people decide these things by aesthetics. There is hard data from people that actually work in usability on how UIs ought to be built.
Flat silhouetted icons have a more versatile set of contexts - much like flat text does. Sure, you can express a lot in an icon that's 3D and whatnot but it needs its own stage to 'act' and really come alive, or else it'll just look a bit small, hard to read or a set of them will look too dense and over-egged on a shelf. Maximalism is visually demanding, and whilst it'll look cool, the context is too small for those kind of gaudy claims of some huge game-changer in aesthetics.- It's not I don't welcome them, as I do like diversity, but this is not gonna be some game-changer like when skeuomorphics was binned by Apple.
I'm unconvinced. The article cites Airbnb and "the internet" as evidence:
> After Airbnb showed off their redesign, the internet exploded with soft, dimensional, highly detailed icon sets prompted into existence using generative AI tools.
One company's redesign + random proofs of concept does not indicate a real trend, and the idea that LLMs make designing with dimensionality in mind more accessible is dubious.
Good design requires consistency. High dimensionality makes consistency harder to achieve. LLMs perform better when there are fewer design nuances to consider. Additionally, we can expect LLMs to reinforce existing trends, as they're all trained on what exists today.
A while ago I read this news about Microsoft bringing back 3D and skeuomorphism: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/20/24249735/microsoft-fluent...
Then it turns out Microsoft brought back 3D in the worst way possible: The non-interactive parts are now 3D — and look interactive — while the interactive parts are still flat like before.
I am trying to find examples, here's one: https://imgur.com/a/8tjT42h
Notice the top part has a 3D graphic which invites clicking... but it is dead. And the live parts look dead and don't invite interaction.
> Back in the early 2000s, UI design like this had a high skill ceiling. It took years to master lighting, materials, and depth. Now? That level of craft is often just a [AI] prompt away.
That is very interesting: Modernism and its descendents were very much about minimalism - how much could you do with minimal components. It applies to visual aesthetics (including much of abstract art), writing (e.g., Hemingway), architecture, and much else, even some music (singer-songwriters, Philip Glass). It's democratic - anyone can do it, or far more than can design complicated aesthetics. There have been other trends since, some rejecting that concept, but you can see that minimalism everywhere, in clothes, in industrial design, and even in HN's design. 'Great designers', you may have heard, 'focus not on what to add, but on what to take away'.
AI enables maximalism; it could transform aesthetics in everything. It enables complexity - including in fashion, in architecture, in writing, almost everywhere.
This theory is that AI removes the issue of efficiency for the creator: AI allows people to create maximalist, or non-minimalist design easily. Still, minimalism's value is very much about efficiency for the user, including focus. Excess design is a distraction and is generally not productive - how does distracting us with detailed icons help us? What is the value?
I love that efficiency in modernism. HN takes the minimalist approach, iirc, in part to attract a community that is focused on its content and not bells and whistles. And I worry that in broader society, as people now routinely hide from very serious dangers (to freedom, to peace, from climate change, etc.), this new trend will be more circuses to distract us.
I want to be excited about this, I _HATE_ the flatness of android, windows 10/11, even macos.. but I'm afraid they'll fuck it up.. the 3D objects will be actual objects, everything will be crufted on top of the bloated dumpster-fire that is "modern" UI "frameworks". If git had been with us since the 00s, we could just do a hard-reset down to the latest commit before it became flat and ugly.
I like skeuomorphism, I hope it comes back.
But the best UI is custom. It would be better if apps had themable UIs so users could apply custom themes if they want to make all their apps have a particular style (e.g. metal, sepia, colorful, modern). Because then the UI can be skeuomorphic or minimal or anything else.
Apple has recently been adding more UI customization. There were custom lock screens in iOS 17, custom app icons in iOS 18, and something's planned for iOS 19. It hasn't gotten much attention, maybe in part because there's still a lot you can't customize (especially in most non-Apple apps), more likely because Android is still even more customizable (especially because it's not as locked down). But Apple doing it is significant because they could start a more widespread trend.
This is fueled more by nostalgia than usefulness. That game example is horrible. It draws attention to icons more than the content itself. Makes the whole experience fatiguing.
The style of user interfaces has gotten more colorful and dimensional, but the actual user interface has generally gotten worse.
For example, I just bought a new scanner. It has a hot mess of a user interface. It mashes together all kinds of selection schemes, with little rhyme or reason. You just have to randomly click on things, navigating up and down, until you eventually find, say, the destination folder to write the scans to.
Just the other day I installed Pandora on my phone. I had to ask grok how to close the app, as it has no X button. Blarf. Probably somebody got an award for this.
So we're going back to Aqua from 20 years ago?
In 2009, I recorded a few Flash websites with 3D, videos, and parallax motions.
Here’s an inspiring one:
There are some other interesting dynamics in UX that aren't just cyclical trends:
- Natural language interfaces. You can now communicate with your computer with language, voice or text. There are some situations where this is an improvement, but others where it's not. It'll be interesting to see how interfaces are designed to combine the best of both worlds.
- Adaptive interfaces. The UI/UX of the last period of computing is largely a solved problem. There are standard UX solutions for most types of problems. It's also become significantly easier to build these interfaces, and LLMs are pretty good at writing basic declarative UIs. I think the bar will be raised such that users expect their interfaces to adapt to them, instead of a one-size-fits-all solution.
- Immersive interfaces. This might be similar to "dimensional" but more about the actual UX instead of just how 3D the buttons and icons are. I think using 3 dimensions is a natural solution for expressing higher information density. VR and AR will eventually catch on in some form.
The new Airbnb icons perform horribly on my 2019 Macbook. Interacting with the tabs is something like 5fps.
Performance aside, the author's game selector design is so much nicer than Airbnb's implementation.
flat, minimalist design has been a disaster for the human race
if designers need the AI hypetrain to bring back drop shadows and the basic usability affordances we had for the 30 years before they ruined things, so be it
I'm not convinced. Show me the results of A/B study along any set of UX metrics you'd like to measure. The author uses the term "performative" without any performance metrics.
Going all the way back to Parc, pre-OSX Mac OS, VRML, OpenStep, and countless widget and windows managers for Linux (anyone remember Enlightenment (https://www.enlightenment.org/about.md ?) we've had deep dimensional design, animations, and heavy-weight skeuomorphics multiple times and have always returned to shallow static dimensional design for mass/generic applications.
I suspect it amounts to less overall mental effort which improves workflow speed and, thus, a greater perception of interactivity.
Maybe deep dimensional design will return when cheap and ubiquitous AR (augmented reality) or VR becomes a...reality, but I don't see it happening with 2D displays.
I do miss IconFactory, Everaldo's Crystal Clear Icons, Tango, Longhorn, and other trends from the beginning of 21st century.
I'm not convinced.
Unlike fashion, where self-expression is central, UI/UX design isn't driven by aesthetic cycles - it's fundamentally about function. The goal is to disappear, serving as a seamless bridge between the user and the task at hand.
Skeuomorphism had its moment because it provided familiarity in the early days of digital interfaces, helping users transition into a new paradigm. But that need has passed. Design has evolved, not cyclically, but linearly - toward clarity, efficiency, and minimal cognitive friction.
What we're seeing now may be visually novel, but I don't believe it represents a true paradigm shift. If anything, it's a stylistic flourish layered on top of the same core goal: helping people get things done as easily and intuitively as possible.
The first time I visited https://svelte.dev , the non-flat-vector banner instantly won me. It just stands out from the world around it. I just sort of assumed the engineering was superior to the competition if they were going to lead with crimped metal (and was right).
Flat design has always struck me as an extremist response to an issue. Windows Vista required everyone to be on the same page design-language wise in order to look good, but can the same be said of Windows XP? You can make just a few parts of your app drop-shadowed, you can add some slight reflection gradients while keeping the whole thing matte, you do not need to get rid of all visual depth just to avoid the feeling of zeerust.
There used to be a school of design which understood that design first and foremost is pragmatic and that it needs to be understood as a form of communication. Very few people care about design as such, they care about the functionality.
For decades I have seen a bizarre iteration over various "aesthetics" of interface design, each successive step having been hailed as a new, better way to interact with our devices. Consistently each step has made interacting with devices more tedious.
Design isn't about how colorful your icons are or how many dimensions they have. I think it is very clear that the quality of the work designers do has drastically declined, especially the focus of aesthetic experience over usability has been an absolute disaster.
While just because a company wants this, I doubt this is the future, however...
Just a couple days ago I was thinking about this (and in fact, started exploring icon packs for my desktop) that all the UIs I use are reduced to "black and white" icons and widgets. Colors are missing, sophisticated shapes too. Sometimes I am actually wondering what an icon is meant to represent.
At my new gig I have to use web Outlook (not allowed to use my finger-memorized mutt setup), and I must say it's a pleasure to look at the UI. Still line drawing icons, but and elegant play with colors at least. Similar to how some LibreOffice Icon packs look like.
I rather hope this is the future. Use colors as accents, leverage a "grouping" functionality with them.
The article really is just about using AI to create non-flat icons. The rest of the UI is still flat and hasn’t changed.
I'm not a fan o this design - UX is worse and everything seems like screaming for attention. I like flat design because it's easier to guide user into the most important part of the screen and avoiding distractions. I could understand maybe 3d animation so you can embed somehow more information what this icon do but making this everything so colorful is distasteful for me. For desktop I still prefer to have just on hover have text to tell what icon do.
So, same as every other kind of design: form over function and cycle in-between various styles to keep on selling. Except here I guess what's being sold is the time of the designers inside corps who need to keep on changing things to have a job. Just give me old Airbnb, old Slack, old iOS, old Google Maps, I could find my way through it just fine.
"I did a quick mockup"
Sure you did.. https://openemu.org/
Back then, all sorts of designs made the web a marvel. Until algorithms kicked in. We stripped the design in favor of machine-understandable information composition. So our thing would be most recommended by AD-pumped services/listings/directories. At the end, outreach mattered more than an elegant product. Unfortunately still does.
All I see is annoying pointless animations.
Are they part of the actual airbnb "new site" or just the article's vision?
nice. so basically we are so "back" to the icons i saw from my packard bell desktop shitty navigator OS like 30 years ago lol. everything is truly cyclical (also in fashion like what gen-z is wearing) and i'm old enough now i guess so it a little jarring to see these things playing out before my eyes.
I can't be the only one who thinks these look ugly. Material Design Expressive feels more future forward.
https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...
a.k.a. People are using whatever Dall-E 3 give them without curation and believing they're designers.
Lots of people talking about how this looks like 2000's clipart, (and I'm not here to disagree) but seems like no one is talking about how these appear to be full 3D models that can be manipulated. AirBnb is actually being fairly subtle (small spinning animation on load) considering how over the top that could get, quickly. People have been doing small versions of this with 3D css transforms, but this is a step further.
Inevitably these things are fashion, and big companies want to have just slightly unique experiences. Usually that means doing something hard that the average site will struggle to replicate for a while, be that squishy UX animations, elegant minimalism, now 3D.
"Digital Design" has been fully subsumed by the needs of business for a long time now. When smartphones were new, an argument could be made that HCI was just as important as content in onboarding users to a new type of device with different levels of information density. There were developments like double-tap on to center a text block in the viewport, pinch to zoom, pull to refresh, swipe across cards to switch apps (WebOS came up with that one).
Now? It's completely flatlined, the changes are incremental and made only in the service of getting you to buy more, view more ads and hide fees until the last possible moment in the checkout funnel.
What I find interesting is the author neglects to mention that Jony Ive was responsible for both introducing the flat design in iOS 7 they seem to lament and the AirBnB redesign they're praising as a positive paradigm shift.
In my opinion, a lot recent UI/UX and visual design has become less about seeking to understand and improve the way we interact with machines and more about promoting a digital form of fast fashion full of trends that everyone is expected to follow - change for the sake of change. This post only provides more support for that.
The new airbnb design is super cheugy and unbalanced. I would not have approved that pull request. There are so many issues with it that I'm not sure where to start.
It's also incredibly obvious which UI elements are handled by different teams, as there seems to be zero coordination between them, invoking Conway's Law and thus painting the picture of an increasingly disorganized company.
> Those aren’t my words. They’re Brian Chesky’s, CEO of Airbnb, after what can only be described as a landmark redesign of the platform. A redesign full of whimsical, animated, 3D icons and warm, tactile surfaces.
I just opened the app and, aside from the animated tab icons shown in the article (which are super laggy on my device), the app looks exactly the same as always. How in the world is this a "landmark" redesign?
I think we're in a loop guys
Diamorphism already has a meaning:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dimorphism "the existence of two different forms (as of color or size) of a species especially in the same population. sexual dimorphism. b. : the existence of a part (such as leaves of a plant) in two different forms."
Interesting - wrote this a few days ago about information density: https://www.lippihom.com/blog/designing-for-cognition-the-en.... Lots of overlap with how it seems like "old" UI elements are coming back.
I don't think it is 2D vs 3D, but rather 2D and 3D vs 4D which probably has these guys a little worried. The human interface is still the same but now instead of something that responds instantly or deterministically like the doorbell interface which has tactile input and auditory output, the output is automated actions in time. This is what the thinking output in LLM interface is. I don't know if the language and semantics allow me to say this but the LLM output is more than a 2D screen, it is also in time. That is the fundamental change.
This might not be different from say ... clicking a button causing a massive Rube Goldberg machine to take money out of my bank account, send emails about my booking to all interested parties with signals moving across continents before in some time in the future sending me a confirmation message when everything is finished. People are beginning to think in terms of the output of the action of pressing a button to book as automation instead of just output on a screen that says successful or failed attempt to book.
(If anyone from the Airbnb design team reads this, please, please, please, work on making sure that the absolute important information about a booking in text messages are visible in the text message. And that the page before booking does not hide information about the booking on an iPhone 13. You do not have control of the thousand different combinations of phones, operating systems, ect so when the information has be presented in only words it has to be done in a way that people understand them.)
Firstly- the airbnb redesign is still flat and minimal. Only the icon bar is different- but not in a good way. The design is too heavy, unclear and does a bad job adding to the rest. Of course the ceo is trying to paint the redesign in the best light possible but there is little reason for praise here.
Those icons are great, that's the type of look that I love. I still love the look of BeOS and it's icons..
Gee great, the designers got bored again
I’m not a designer, but I’ve been around UI long enough to notice the shift. This new move toward more color, depth, and personality feels like a step in the right direction. It’s not just about things looking nicer—it actually makes digital spaces feel alive again.
I want a flat, low bitrate, low color, easily re-identifiable icon that, when 'clicked', depresses in a perfect square footprint to indicate that I have done an action. What is shown here is the exact opposite of what I want in a GUI.
Airbnb’s “redesign “ is half-baked or really 1/8th baked. It’s still mostly flat and colorless, textureless, they slapped 3 3D icons in it and made a big PR campaign out of it, as if they cured homelessness.
The future is less UI and tons more interacting with AI right from your personal AI mobile device’s Lock Screen.
It will do everything for you that you do now using the web ..we’ll be opening less apps and web browsers in a few years or less.
This is all just fashion, right? None of this makes the apps easier to use.
I get that EG you might find it hard to sell a green-screen app on an iPhone, but I don't see this diamorphic stuff adding much value.
Can the UI future be Mac OS 9 platinum with 265-colour icons again, please?
The PC mouse wire looks like garbage, throw it out and do it over.
How are we not full circle back to the early 00's with this design? It didn't really catch on then. Maybe this time? Wasn't a big fan of it then. Still not.
I actually liked the skeuomorphic UI that Apple had. I miss the aqua interface. Buttons as buttons and not text. And also, god help me, brushed metal.
That animation is cool but the end result is still as flat.
I hate those Airbnb icons. They look like nothing, just objects in a somewhat cartoon-y style. I much prefer where both Apple and Google move UI design.
I'm surprised no one talked about Samsung, their new oneui has moved in a hybrid direction.
In other words it reminds me more of early android design.
I like it.
as a primarily backend developer I find cursor and chatgpt/grok (for more compelx components) totally amazing. I can finally build UIs that I want for my projects :) I think I have good taste (lol) I just could never spend those hours and days polishing.
Now I can ask it to do some frontend while I focus on backend in the meantime.
We just need the sales agent now.
So a full circle from colorful design to simplified design to flat design then to colorful design again.
I think its look like the gradient type of things getting better instead of the solid color.
"The future is..." well it might be until the next fashion change comes about.
You can’t be serious that this guy is acting like he just deactivated skuemorphism.
if you really want to laugh, check out who is the person/firm behind this whimsical, tactile, colorful redesign. I won't spoil you the fun of guessing.
Why are people still making 2MB animated gifs...
The UI PAST was colorful and dimensional
"The best design is design that gets out of the way" as a maxim will probably hold.
Users may state a preference for "delight" and claim to be delighted by maximally rich graphics but I doubt it'll move the needle as a business priority.
As more AI slop pollute our digital consumption streams, my bet is that these attempts at simulacrum will quickly turn garish.
About damn time!
I mean this is interesting in ways, but I don’t really care which particular form of soullessness is used to advertise products I wish I didn’t have to use. It’s a marketing movement more than an artistic movement.
I saw AirBNB’s current ad that’s all AI “aesthetic” and I figuratively puked in my mouth. We’ve reached corporate AI slops bleeds into design systems.
Hard no from me.
Even after all this time I don’t like it. It looks like 90s geocities icons on modern flat iOS design. Going by feel, it looks dumb
Finally. I'm so sick of the flat design.
...except Airbnb's redesign is still extremely flat. Three icons that have 3-D shadows is not groundbreaking
Can we just have UI that is intuitive? Like, a button looks like a button, sort of.
So the industry first squeezed talented designers out of the UI business by shoving that ugly ass flat style down everyone's throat, and now they're proposing to cycle back to skeuomorphism which the former were capable of and replace all remaining human designers with AI.
So diamorphine is an alt. for heroin. Just saying
ah yes of course
- a shift happens when someone says it’ll happen
AND
- big businesses have such a love for color and dimension and have not been dulling everything down except for your personalized feed for years now
/s
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Not a new thought but it always surprises me how much groupthink applies in these situations. Airbnb announced a new design and we’ve all just collectively accepted that it’s the future? …what?
I don’t hate the trend but I am underwhelmed. Just loaded up the Airbnb site and… it’s new icons. The actual UI I’m interacting with hasn’t changed a jot, though. Google’s Material UI stuff from a few days ago felt much more interesting.