The case for loud software
A decade of muted greys taught us that good taste is quiet. But the screens that actually made us feel something were the ones that refused to whisper.
I spent two weeks last winter rebuilding a small internal tool, and on day eleven I caught myself adding another grey. Hero grey, button grey, the grey that lives between two greys. The interface was tasteful. It was also impossible to remember. Nobody on the team could tell, from a screenshot, whether they were looking at the new dashboard or the old one — and that, more than any aesthetic preference, was the actual problem.
Pattern as a way of being recognised
The Memphis Group understood something the flat-design decade forgot: a surface can carry identity before it carries information. The Bacterio squiggle was never decoration; it was a signature you could spot across a showroom floor. Software lost that vocabulary around 2014, and we spent ten years trying to win it back with gradients.