To achieve hat you're showing you need some depth to the button. Hard to accomplish with today's design trends.
This why some people complain about UI design "trends". They elevate an aesthetic choice over clarity, usability, or function (not sure which word is best here). Or in this case it seems part of the push was to reduce the screen space taken by a control.
1. No spacing.
2. Information-heavy cluttered screens.
3. No auto-save. You have to click the save button to save.
4. Colored icons. Colored interfaces. Not "tinted" a hue of black or white. Actual vibrant colors. And not just one color either! Two colors, at least.
5. 3d.
6. Main menus.
7. border-style: ridge;
They exhibit almost all of these properties, and they were glorious to use.
This translucent, rounded, acrylic, material, whatever, it's just not fun. We had the technology for making glorious media players in the year 2000. Where did our technology go?
I'm on linux right now and I checked a bunch of desktop environments and every single one I checked the themes for (the theme browser sucks, by the way) what I see is dark theme with a blue tint, light theme with a blue tint, dark theme with a green tint, light theme with a green tint. A Windows 95, XP, and 7 clone. And that's it?
It just blows my mind. I don't know if it's because the theme browser sucks (the websites to browse the themes also suck, by the way), but I can not find one theme like XP but not XP. I'm left wondering where did all those people who made so many beautiful, glorious, amazing WinAmp themes go to. Did they become extinct? Are the theming APIs too limited today to go all out? Is the technology not there yet to have border-image in your windows borders?
This is just so depressing. I'm hoping the pendulum swings back in the next 10-20 years, and hopefully I'm still alive by then to see some cooler GUIs.
No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Big (resizable) UI elements with poke-ability are fine. Auto-saving can be great depending on the application. Let’s just ditch the false simplicity and flatness.
I'm really not a fan of mobile. If possible, I'd rather ignore it completely and just let mobile users rotate their screens.
