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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.)
Is that a mock up you made or something that exists?
Check this one out: https://store.kde.org/p/1985239
It's a mockup I found on image search (from searching "neobrutalism GUI" or the like): https://www.magnific.com/premium-vector/hand-drawn-neo-brutalism-ui-elements-collection_186004756.htm
And yeah, that theme you linked is already pretty cool. Not terribly enamored with the retro aesthetic personally (especially with bad contrast like here), but if that can be done with KDE/Kvantum, then an actual neobrutalist them, or just one with the papercuts fixed, is likely just as possible...