I'm going to pull a print/graphic designer card and say that "minimalism" isn't actually a style. I think I understand how it's being used in this conversation as a shorthand for "2002-2012 Google UI", which had a massive impact on the way people thought about web design. But I don't think it's fair to say that the reason for the staying power of that particular type of minimalist design is simple repetition or consistency. I think it's a combination of laziness on the part of the designers and training of the population, and it has led to a lack of curiosity on the part of users when they're confronted with more complex interfaces. I think it's important to continue to buck that trend. Every interface should feel like a jewel box full of easter eggs. But having said that, design's purpose is to download information into human brains, and so [edit: clarity] the minimal opacity of the underlying information has to be the primary design goal in all cases.
Sometimes though, "minimalism" in the Google web design sense actually makes the information much too opaque. The ideal design requirement should be specified as that which gives the user all the tools to navigate immediately. If those tools are a little complicated, in the words of Thomas Pynchon, "Why should things be easy to understand?" This is where I have a huge problem with iOS, just for example, hiding scrollbars on components that don't obviously look like they're scrollable - so users never realize that there are more options off to the right. That's minimalist, but it's less than the minimum information you need to use the software.
What gets me is the death of decorations, and then trying to guess what interaction you're going to get if you click on a certain flat color bit of a background window.
I keep thinking back to the winxp to 7 era (along with the various windowblinds/uxstyle third party skins), plus various furniture, fittings or tools/utensils/appliances from decades/centuries past (so antiques essentially). The physical items would have textures from the materials used and the processes to make them, maybe they'd be gnurled to add a grip, but also elaborations that aren't purely functional or just to make it look nicer. When you're familiar with those visuals they do seem to help you know what part of it you're looking at, and how it's going to act if you grab/click any given point.
Scrollbars are now an annoyance (when they're not hidden) as they're often low contrast and made to fade into the background, just another dull rectangle in a sea of others, rather than a distinct bit of UI chrome. There used to be a unique inline and small grooves at the centre point as I remember.
I'm not about to declare having the pendulum swing to the other extreme would be better, but it'd be interesting to see it explored again.
Saying that designers are lazy and its their fault is a weak argument. For sure not all of them are lazy. Most of the time they are told what to produce.
What you are talking about is economics. Its possible to deliver good results faster/cheaper and the result is more timeless. Also clean interfaces are putting function and content in front. Thats why companies choose this.
So dont blame the designer but the boss/manager. Its like saying that app is slow because devs are lazy.
I'm sympathetic to working in big corporate structures as a designer where diktats you disagree with come down from on high. So I'm not blaming individual designers here. But I do blame art departments for not fighting back against non-artistic managerial marketing decisions, and some of that blame rests on art directors for capitulating, and some of it rests on designers for not making their opinions heard to the art directors. From a corporate standpoint, listening to your marketing team instead of your design department - and instead of having an open door to designers to walk in with ideas - is extremely limiting. It's not making the most of your resources. But design departments get a certain kind of laziness in their culture once it's the case that no one upstairs is going to listen, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think we agree on a lot of things which aren't vocabulary. Well, that and jewel box full of Easter eggs. I have no idea wth you mean or why non designers would care. But you've touched upon one of my biggest gripes, the difference between simplification and reduction. A simplification organizes information into useful patterns so that it can hide away redundancy. A reduction cuts information for the sake of presentation. Reduction can feel like simplification because the end result is a nice crisp aesthetic, but the difference is apparent when you try to use it. Its like the difference between tidying your room and throwing all your stuff out.
Designers tend to love the Vignelli map, but everyone in the city hated it and it was short lived. To this day you can still hear condescending remarks like the Vignelli map was "to abstract for NY". "NY choose the worse map". But its exactly like you said, first and foremost the point of design is to download information into brains, and by that metric the current map is far superior which is why it won.
Consider the background geography. Ardent supporters of the London Tube / Vignelli style insist surface streets are clutter full stop. Maybe that reduction of information makes sense in London and Europe where streets are a mess anyway, but in a grid city that reduction doesn't make sense. The present map simplifies the streets down to just a few representative examples so you know the local orientation of the grid and have a few reference points. Simplification, not reduction. The information is still there.
The coloring system is another massive example of simplification. The Vignelli map seems to hate information compression, insisting every line have its own color and own dots. The current map reduced clutter by organizing lines by where they run in Manhattan, denoting the express/local difference with black/white dots. Personally I think that symbol could be less arbitrary, but most people have no trouble figuring it out quickly. Its a simplification down to a single line which makes everything fit in a tight space while being easy to follow. There have been changes in service patterns which have ruined parts of the current map, but the very original version had some nice symmetry to it (and mostly still does). Even though the rule is technically "color by Avenue in Manhattan", that rule lined up with certain repeating "color zones", eg both South Bronx and Flatbush being Green/Red, Upper West side and New Lots being Blue/Red etc. You could sort of count on certain colors to be associated with certain broadly defined endpoints.
Perhaps, this example, being so utterly detached from the modern web design world, is one you might use simply because no one has any personal stake in it. Its a lesson designers should learn more often. Hiding and removing != simplifying. Good != pretty. Organize information well and its often close to pretty on its own.
(I have plenty of gripes with the present map but that's for another time)
Just want to say, I loved clicking on that mta.info link and seeing the SVG load in gradually, first the coarse map elements, then the coloured subway lines, then finer and finer details and labels. Felt like some kind of crescendo of dataviz, as if the THX sound effect ought to play over it. 10/10.
> Designers tend to love the Vignelli map, but everyone in the city hated it
Those designers were/are more illustrators than designers [1]. Design is, or at least should be, as much about the function of an object as about it's looks. A design that hinders functionality isn't a good design.
[1] I call the modern breed of such designers "Dribbble-driven"
Sometimes though, "minimalism" in the Google web design sense actually makes the information much too opaque. The ideal design requirement should be specified as that which gives the user all the tools to navigate immediately. If those tools are a little complicated, in the words of Thomas Pynchon, "Why should things be easy to understand?" This is where I have a huge problem with iOS, just for example, hiding scrollbars on components that don't obviously look like they're scrollable - so users never realize that there are more options off to the right. That's minimalist, but it's less than the minimum information you need to use the software.