Dan Counsell

Can we please have the macOS X Lion UI back? 😍

Yes, I would also like that. I would welcome any standard UI that gives us back some tools we lost.
There’s a refined clarity to this version of Aqua. It evolved gracefully to this point, where every element was distinctly different and yet cohesive. Consider the search field alone. Now, search fields have the same appearance of every other field: squared. The pill shape distinguished itself. Removing that characteristic introduced a level of ambiguity that is unnecessary. The same can be said for so much in modern visual design (or lack thereof).
I’d like to point to something I said almost 5 years ago:

me
When we lost visual richness in software, we lost a requirement to think about design with regards to how it looks.
That’s not just making it look nice, that’s making sure that we visually communicate the UI successfully.

It’s very unfortunate that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. I distinctly remember when Apple claimed one value in the new design language was “deference,” but after 12 years, this approach is clearly not as thoughtful as it was advertised. It is not as accessible as they have wished. We still have thin red text on gray buttons that lack significant contrast. We still have translucent elements and blurred backgrounds that confound reason and rationale. We traded away that refined clarity for over a decade of ambiguity.
I took some time to reformat an old Twitter thread on the subject into a proper blog post, and I encourage you to read it. How much has improved since then?

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