Programming is a Pop Culture

Link: Programming is a Pop Culture by Baldur Bjarnason. Published Mon 21 Nov 2022.

An excellent read on how designers, like developers, favour the aesthetic and new and shiny over the researched.

An excellent read on how designers, like developers, favour the whatever-the-new-aesthetic-is over the researched.

Pop cultures favour the visual aesthetic of the day. We all know what sort of aesthetic designers commonly favour. Small, low-contrast text, lots of whitespace, no pure whites or pure blacks (just greys). The details vary with fashion, but each generation of designers has a preferred visual aesthetic. That aesthetic tests poorly; the text is illegible; the layout doesn’t have enough contrast. The information density is so sparse it’s effectively non-existent.

In development, Baldur argues that the current aesthetic favours correctness above all else (so, JSX over HTML and CSS-in-js over CSS); whereas, just a few years ago, we ditched XHTML for the much looser HTML(5).