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74 points goranmoomin | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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pwg ◴[] No.44358323[source]
> Apple's designers (and those of many other companies) come back to the idea of translucency giving order and imbuing personality. I cannot for the life of me understand where this idea comes from.

When the company employs designers on a permanent salaried basis, those designers must make changes in order to assure their continued employment. To do otherwise risks the bean counters in the accounting department asking the pointed question: "Why are we employing all these designers when they are not producing anything?". The result is that there must be change for the purpose of assuring the designers continued employment. Result: translucent designs no one wants, but that looked great in the powerpoint presentations used to assure the designers remained employed.

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1. msy ◴[] No.44361867[source]
You could apply precisely the same cynical calculus to engineering but I suspect a lot of the people nodding along with this could suddenly find it offensive when applied to their mission-critical DevSecOps roadmap.

The reality is there's always work to done responding to changing user needs, market forces and organisational objectives and it's not uncommon that UI design overhauls are driven by an abstract desire to make things seem 'fresh' but that doesn't come (solely) from designers, it's often a top-down strategic directive.