It can’t be a coincidence that they’re doing it all around the same time, there’s got to be a reason. My theories are it’s either:
A) Some kind of dumb legal or regulatory reason or
B) Maybe some kind of environmental / penny-pinching thing where they’re not using so much coloured ink on their documents
so I don’t work directly in this field, only adjacent, but you wanna know the prevailing theory from my graphics friends?
Mobile App Icons
Its a bit of a recursive loop. Partially its the fact that folks who are building things with the intent of launching an app need something recognizable as the icon, so they go simple, high contrast, simple colors, since that tends to be faster for the eye to see in a lineup, and easier to remember. I mean, there’s an argument than McDonalds’ golden arches are a big part of why they succeeded since you could spot them on the road really easily. You want something that reads on the first blink. Then, those ultra simple designs start seeping into the public conscious as what a Modern Design looks like. If you remember everyone getting really really into word art looking things for a while in the 90s, that was a similar thing. It was all the movie titles, it was all the company names. That was a cool new tech, so it defined what Modern looked like.
But now, Modern means that it’s simple, super clean lines, maybe with a single gradient in a shape, but nothing representative, bc that won’t read when its 3mm across on their phone screen.
That culture shift means that other companies, who have older style logos, start getting associated with being out of date. Or at least, they worry it does. It doesn’t take much for the C-suite to panic about that, and they send someone off to come up with a new design. It still needs to look enough like the old one people recognize it, but it has to fit modern style expectations. Thus, stripped down versions like this one. If a company does this frequently, we get used to it, and roll with whatever. When a company does it after many years without a change, it looks like this, and is more obvious, and we mock them.
Not everyone is designing to be an actual app icon, but the radiating effects of this shows up in the way they do their color gradations, and using rounded, non serif fonts. They’re supposed to look more friendly and approachable.
There is an argument about ink and convenience, but that’s more about how silhouettes read better when damaged/distorted/misprinted than about environment. And sorry, but its got nothing to do with legal.
That actually makes a lot of sense, I never thought about it like that.
So the Homophobic Horse Game (Horse Isle 3) is absolutely THE most batshit MMORPG I’ve ever seen.
The graphics are godawful, the moderation is atrocious, the gameplay is anything but intuitive… but the horses?
Oh, god, the horses!
I don’t think the devs realized that in their attempt to create a shitty homophobic game for horse girls, they had accidentally created an incredible simulator for breeding genetic monstrosities that would make God hide his head in shame. You can make 22.3 hand high giant horses with Diplodocus necks and horses with faces that could slice through meat.
You’re allowed to name your store shit like “the gulag” and “the Kremlin” but mentioning having two fathers or putting your pronouns in your profile gets you permabanned for adult content. There are like six mods total and they disallow discussing politics—specifically recruiting for the Communist Party, but also mentioning the pandemic. (But discussing war crimes is apparently a-ok and family friendly, according to Mod Connie, and some auto-generated, mod-written horse names reference the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult.) Here’s an article.
They also don’t seem to like their own game design, because they ban players for “joining mobs” but have a built-in mechanic that, every hour, invites every online player to mob the same location all at once. They also fill the environment with deep, poorly-rendered (but totally escapable) pits to fall into and build in a feature that allows you to yank people towards you from a distance… but punish players for dragging or summoning each other into them.
Also… a huge fraction of their playerbase is gay and only there to breed Monster Factory horses and it clearly infuriates the mods that they’re not taking their bad horse game more seriously.
They also take the suggestion of digital horse abortion really seriously
More seriously than they take a player store named “The Gulag.”
