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posted by Fnord666 on Friday June 30 2017, @04:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the rethinkpad dept.

Just days after Lenovo Group Chief Yang Yuanqing hinted that Lenovo may be pulling out of the PC and Server markets in favor of focusing on datacenters and mobile devices, long-time Thinkpad designer and Retro Thinkpad Project Manager David Hill has announced his resignation from the company. Mr. Hill, who had been in charge of the original ThinkPad design in the early 90's and rose to the rank of Vice President of Design at Lenovo, states:

"I want to broaden my view and create the opportunity to do more in the field of design, not less."

The 25th Anniversary "Retro ThinkPad" project, which was in development for over two years and received over 13,000 responses from long-time ThinkPad fans, is still, for the time being, scheduled for an October 5th announcement. Could internal pressures to minimize costs have resulted in Mr. Hill deciding to take his name off the Retro ThinkPad project which he spearheaded for two and a half years?


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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday June 30 2017, @09:04PM (4 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday June 30 2017, @09:04PM (#533696)

    The entire web industry jumped on that bandwagon, but I really can't say offhand who started it. Do you have some kind of citation that Apple was the instigator of this horrible flat-UI design trend, rather than just another bandwagon-jumper? I'd be happy to have something else to bash Apple for, but I want to be fair.

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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday June 30 2017, @09:07PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday June 30 2017, @09:07PM (#533698)

    I don't know who Apple ripped it off of, but Apple using it is why the rest of the industry followed.

  • (Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Friday June 30 2017, @09:20PM (1 child)

    by nobu_the_bard (6373) on Friday June 30 2017, @09:20PM (#533703)

    Not 100% sure but - Google started doing this to their main search page around 1999. This was praised because it contrasted the tedious uselessness of their rivals like Yahoo, who crammed every imaginable link on the main page. That Google did not- that emphasized all you had to do was type what you wanted in the search bar.

    Well that's the earliest example of the design philosophy that I recall noticing. I think it trickled down from there, and ended up in places where it didn't really serve as much of a function.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 01 2017, @09:02AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 01 2017, @09:02AM (#533857)

      The reasoning is different. Google only had a search box because their search algorithm was good enough that that was all you needed. The empty page also loaded MASSIVELY faster than every other search engine. Remember, people were using dial-up and web page size really mattered. The other search engines were index/category based. Having as many categories on the front page meant fewer page loads so despite the longer loading time, loading one page was still faster than loading a couple intermediate pages.

      Nowadays things are full of empty space because sites were getting more and more cluttered with buttons and borders surrounding each element. We went too far with borders within borders within borders within borders that we've swung all the way to borderless everything and the only way to manage content without borders is to keep it far away from other content. As an example, this text field has three borders right next to each other: The text field border, the edit comment border, and the post comment border. The Edit Comment border completely matches the Post Comment border and should be removed. The title could be changed to Edit And Post Comment. But no, no one took the time to think about design. Adding tons of whitespace lets you not think about design too.

      There's also the UI studies showing people read columns of text better than wide pages so websites put their real data in a small centered column. Now with phones, sites want one thing displayed at a time so we get huge vertical white space as well.

      No one uses whitespace to reduce page sizes anymore. If anything, the dynamically loading content makes loading far worse as pages skip around as you're trying to read them. Eventually we'll swing back to tons of borders. Everything in the computing industry runs in cycles as the pros and cons of doing something one way are forgotten by the next group who only see the pros of the 'new' thing and the cons of the current thing.

  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday July 01 2017, @06:44AM

    by Bot (3902) on Saturday July 01 2017, @06:44AM (#533836) Journal

    I think it's a degeneration of the so called "material design" that started to appear on android/google. It is closely related to the fact that ugly ass flat icons are quicker to market than the 3d, shaded icons that were especially popular on iphones at the time. Bonus evil points to the designers who made them monochrome.
    I understand, 3D was going rococo, but damn.

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