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The anti-minimalist backlash is the bigger story behind Oxygen’s revival
(filipfila.wordpress.com)
this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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I also always find the minimalism vs. maximalism debate interesting for usability. Lots of minimal designs are so flat that you can't tell a button from a label or icon.
At the same time, iOS' new Frutiger theme regularly confuses me with its transparency, e.g. yesterday I saw that the silent-mode notification had a ➋ inside. It was centered and everything. Then the notification went away, but the ➋ stayed, because it was from an app icon behind.
I wish, we could throw out the bad eye candy, like transparency, while keeping the good parts, like 3D buttons and such. I feel like this kind of neo-brutalist UI design isn't the worst direction to go in:
(This particular example isn't perfect, like the buttons are flat, while there's useless shadows around the boxes. But yeah, could just move those shadows to the buttons and it would still look fine.)
I actually love that design, it's minimal without being corpo-slick. Is it just a mockup or is there some way to make all my computers look that way?
Well, this kind of design language is actually referred to as "neobrutalism", so you might find a theme under this name. But from what I've seen so far, it's mostly a thing in web design at this point...