Question for web / app / UI designers

[Yinzer]

Ever since the intro of things like Chris Bangle's 7-series, flat design in iOS7, the scorched death of skeumorphism, and car design silliness like the Acura beak, Lexus spindle grille, chrome fake fender vents, the Nissan "floating roof," etc., I've turned into a really tough customer (whining baby) who views at least 50% of "new and improved designs" with complete dread. Most seem like solutions to problems nobody could have possibly requested.

The last straw was tonight finding that Verizon reprogrammed the DVR remote control interface so that instead of keeping your eyes on the screen and thumbing to options on the screen using a button & 4 nearby arrows for 90% of your business, you now have to look at the remote and use your other hand reach the PLAY button in the middle of the remote and then again look down and reach even farther away to the red button with "C" at the bottom to delete a program. This appeared without warning didn't even leave the old way of doing things as an option, taking me 5 minutes to figure out what was going on.

Tapatalk used to be pretty great and is now painful to use with confusing menus in its attempt to be a social app which it just isn't. Windows, iOS, and OSX use transparency as if the world suddenly forgot that things can be behind things on the screen - because we all wished 8.5x11 paper was see-thru and hard to read. Most everything I do now with iOS takes twice as many swipes and presses as before iOS7, and frequently only after hunting and guessing how things work that used to be just intuitive. But every screen is now white, yay. And, ios7's grey-low-contrast text on white backgrounds and hiding of functions behind multiple clicks just to have a clean interface has bled over onto most every website, now being Un clear what's clickable and what's FYI only...no more buttons to grab your attention subconsciously. Even microwaves have button shapes for God's sake. And since colors count as showing what's "clickable" now, no longer is color used to indicate certain information and most all text is a hard to read grey or light blue on a low-contrast background. Bottom line, all this simplicity makes you have to work harder in minute amounts that are really noticeable when stacked together. Or now most websites feature a high definition photograph taking up the whole screen for no useful reason after the first wow effect and require lots of scrolling far up down just to get to the various click options that used to fit onto one screen. Everything is flat and undistinguishable so you have to really think for what's clickable vs what's just info, and I often get frustrated as to what's really clickable since grey text still feels like what used to represent a non-available unclickable option. Now unclickable options are really, really light grey. And why are dumbed down UI graphics for phones now used on computer operating systems where it's possible to have a 30 inch plus screen. WTH

Come on designers, what's going on behind the scenes. Is this considered the best way of doing things? Do any of you discuss this amongst yourselves in the work environment, and is this really perceived as good design, a huge step up from 5 years ago and here to stay? Am I just out of touch or in the small minority? Really, what's going on. Thought it'd be interesting to hear from designers and non-designers in a non-techie forum, I honestly want to hear expert insight to learn me what I'm not seeing.

I can only think that perhaps UI reached a point of near-perfection within today's 2D high resolution screens with little room to improve, and human nature and marketing departments just have to keep tinkering.

 

[Miner]

I think the desire to grab more of the share of the market mixed with Gee Wiz effect of good salesmanship drives the change. I'm currently supporting a set of 25 workstations and 1 we server where the workstations are running a virtual machine, simply to connect a web browser to the server. The reason for it is that industry runs VM.

 

[Zoom]

High tech and user experience specialist here... You mention very valid points.

I can only think that perhaps UI reached a point of near-perfection within today's 2D high resolution screens with little room to improve, and human nature and marketing departments just have to keep tinkering.

And that's the explanation, it goes in cycles i have noticed, at the moment marketing dept have the upper hand. Then people will complain / vote with their wallets and a new cycle will begin The systems i design are for a private company so i cannot show anything, but the idea is to keep the number of interactions to get to the needed information to a minimum (and under a maximum of 3).
Another thing, a simple design is very hard to achieve. It requires a lot of work, dedication, and someone with a good vision to keep everything in check. It's a natural tendency to produce over complicated things (and thus poor UX) and we have to fight it actively, all the time.

 

[blue_myriddn]

Problem that I run in to is that I design for management and not the customer. The reason being is that management is so infused with the belief that they are right that any sort of discussion is just boring and moot. Agreeing with what they want is less painful than trying to walk them through the process only to reach the end and realize they just heard "blah, blah, blah" and will repeat their instruction to do it the way they want. Now I just shortcut and go right to the part where they are happy, often at the sacrifice of what would look better.

I suspect this is true for many designers.

 

[Yinzer]

And that's the explanation, it goes in cycles i have noticed, at the moment marketing dept have the upper hand. Then people will complain / vote with their wallets and a new cycle will begin

I'm surprised to see so very, very little online complaints after 3 years of this bad (IMO) UI trend which makes me think people don't care like me and it's here to stay. That's opposite of the sh*tstorm of complaints about aspects of ios6 skeumorphism and people clamoring for "something new" that I stumbled on when scrambling around online for how to revert back to ios6. I had no idea how much sleep people were losing over green felt, wood grain, and 3D realistic graphics (you know, the things that take real talent to create and which make the experience more engaging). I wasn't following the scuttlebutt online and updated to ios7 expecting the normal refinement update unlike Windows' radical reinventions each time, which I always felt to be admissions that what they had before was awful and required a complete re-do.

A few articles that I completely agree with have appeared by some smart people yet they seem to make no waves online like the anti-green felt skeumorphism bashing.

http://cheerfulsw.com/2015/destroying-apples-legacy/
http://www.computerworld.com/articl...e-ui-design-hate-ios-mac-os-x-hci-itbwcw.html

In general, it seems many of today's "design improvements" seem to be mostly about removing as much detail as possible while retaining the smallest hint of the original DNA, heading towards something very overly simplistic and minimalized like its a design contest and not the creation of a consumer product. Makes you wonder what's coming when "the next thing" is demanded? Color goes away and into shaded greys? Or just jump straight to binary black & white?

Still super curious to hear others' views, is this current flat all-white low-contrast unintuitive hidden commands UI is considered good, great, bad, indifferent?

 

[Zoom]

Yeah they call that "material design". I cannot see the appeal either...
I work for a team that had a radical "agile" approach in UX design, that means interviewing the users and designing for them (and certainly not for management). The end result of that process is a lot of happy users and even emails thanking us for doing something nice for a change. But that's a very different way of working even for the users (in our case, the business side of the company) - and for a public product such as a phone UI it's even more difficult as you need to count on a pool of select "trusted users" who may or may not be representative of the larger population. And too large a pool and you'll end up with compromised "design by committee" which is never good. Add to that the need of marketing dept. to have noticeable changes from generation to generation (otherwise people will complain there's little or no improvement, understandable) and that's a tough loop to get out of.

 

[Tom239]

I like understatement but not in the sense of boiling all the character out of a design.
Problem is, it's not easy to do well. Getting a desired effect in a minimal way takes real skill.

Typefaces exemplify everything that's hard about design.
Lots of people can design typefaces but very few people can make
a really good one. One of the masters, Adrian Frutiger, said
Legibility and beauty are quite closely associated, and type
design--in its restraint--should not be perceived by the reader,
but rather felt.

A few articles that I completely agree with have appeared by some smart people yet they seem to make no waves online like the anti-green felt skeumorphism bashing.

http://cheerfulsw.com/2015/destroying-apples-legacy/
http://www.computerworld.com/articl...e-ui-design-hate-ios-mac-os-x-hci-itbwcw.html

That first page (“Flat Design”? Destroying Apple’s Legacy… or Saving It)
has a video at the bottom from a guy who likes cars with tail fins.
I agree that this flat design is insipid but I don't think the equivalent
of chrome and tail fins is the answer. I prefer the kind of tasteful
restraint that Frutiger was talking about, not that it's easy to achieve.

 

[Yinzer]

Yeah they call that "material design". I cannot see the appeal either...

Material design is new to me so I googled it...couldn't make it to the end of some articles, I just got too annoyed.

https://material.google.com/#introduction-principles
The 1980's Atari 2600 flat graphics in the age of Retina iPhone screens and 4k monitors just make me really sad. WTH is going on and why are smart people OK'ing stuff like this?

https://getmdl.io
This page is a perfect example of wasting a bunch of the user's time & energy scrolling past large simplistic graphics with colors that clash, just to get to the text which is then in tiny, thin, low-costrast grey font on white background.

I get really annoyed because the user experience is just not as enjoyable as it was 6 years ago, and I feel cheated. At the least it's less fun, and at worst it's non-intuitive and often much, much more inefficient. I recall the eye-opening "wow this is how it should be" when I switched from a Palm Treo ~2010 to an iPad & iPhone. Other than some kitschy details like the reel-to-reel ios6 podcast app, I could't think of one major goof that needed serious reworking (and I dare anyone to try to name one). Now every article on flat or material design is full of overstated improvements to problems that never existed in the first place, using pompous hilarious wording ("immediately accessible experience"..."Create a visual language that synthesizes classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science"...) GMAFB. Whether it's ios7/8/9 or material design, it all reads as thinly-veiled excuses for minimalist design contests just to differentiate in the marketplace instead of stick with what just works. Reminds me of the South Park Smug Alert episode where everyone is so happy with the smell of their own farts. There's also some word or phrase I recall reading (maybe in one of the articles I posted above) where designers get caught up in their work and so obviously know how things work that they forget it's being made for others who didn't create it from the ground up, so they have some blindness or bias that they just can't get past. I think things are so fully entrenched in that mode.

- - - Updated - - -

Getting a desired effect in a minimal way takes real skill.

A question for which I have yet to hear even a slightly reasonable answer is, why even a need for minimalism (other than marketing, to appease Jony Ive's preferences, or to provide busywork for designers on the payroll). There was no readability/understandability issue before. There's no need to save money on ink or paper. No matter what anybody tries to rationalize, there was and is absolutely zero need to provide a consistent experience across platforms or screen sizes. I have never heard of anybody confusing their sock for a turtleneck, and I've never stared in bewilderment at the microwave trying to figure out how to turn up the gas. So before even worrying about ensuring one has the skill to pull off minimalism, why hasn't anyone first ensured they found a reason for it in the first place? Pardon that I keep harping on this, but it's just fascinating to me how much of the world is wrapped up in such a poor (IMO) direction with no discernible consumer-driven reason.

 

[Tom239]

A question for which I have yet to hear even a slightly reasonable answer is, why even a need for minimalism (other than marketing, to appease Jony Ive's preferences, or to provide busywork for designers on the payroll). There was no readability/understandability issue before. There's no need to save money on ink or paper. No matter what anybody tries to rationalize, there was and is absolutely zero need to provide a consistent experience across platforms or screen sizes. I have never heard of anybody confusing their sock for a turtleneck, and I've never stared in bewilderment at the microwave trying to figure out how to turn up the gas. So before even worrying about ensuring one has the skill to pull off minimalism, why hasn't anyone first ensured they found a reason for it in the first place? Pardon that I keep harping on this, but it's just fascinating to me how much of the world is wrapped up in such a poor (IMO) direction with no discernible consumer-driven reason.

I can't defend Apple's so-called flat design because it isn't
to my taste either. And I don't know what Apple had in mind
when it went that way; their sensibilities might not have much
in common with my own taste for understatement.

I don't even know how much Apple tries to be consumer-driven.
Steve Jobs' approach wasn't to study consumers but rather
to invent stuff that the public didn't yet know it wanted.
Sometimes that approach works, sometimes it doesn't.

Although I can't defend Apple's recent choices, I can try to
say what I personally like about spare, clean design.

I very much want products to have style; I'm not a fan of
design that's so minimal as to have no style to speak of.
I'm for understatement but not for no statement at all.

I think we've all encountered fine writing that is concise,
fine music that uses spare instrumentation, fine architecture
that isn't highly ornamented, and bodies that look good
without any tattoos. It's not that spareness is the only way to
design things, but when a spare design is done really well it
can be every bit as expressive as an elaborate one.
The kind of design I have in mind is deceptively minimal
looking; it seems graceful and simple but it is not at all
easy to create. A song can have what sounds to a casual
listener like a simple drum part but another drummer hearing
it will appreciate how much practice and taste it took to make
it sound just the way it did.

Again, I can't tell you why Apple went they way they did.
But insipid and elaborate are not the only two options.

 

[Yinzer]

Although I can't defend Apple's recent choices, I can try to
say what I personally like about spare, clean design.

I very much want products to have style; I'm not a fan of
design that's so minimal as to have no style to speak of.
I'm for understatement but not for no statement at all.

I think we've all encountered fine writing that is concise,
fine music that uses spare instrumentation, fine architecture
that isn't highly ornamented, and bodies that look good
without any tattoos. It's not that spareness is the only way to
design things, but when a spare design is done really well it
can be every bit as expressive as an elaborate one.

Here's an example of what I mean when I try to understand today's flat/material design interfaces which are huge steps backward in function & appearance. I use simplisafe alarms and they recently "improved" their iphone app.

The ios6-esque app (left, below) was obviously designed back when UI function was not sacrificed for the sake of appearance. Its use of buttons, colors, shadings, boxing-in of info areas and well thought-out overall placement kept things immediately intuitive as to what does what, what's clickable vs. what's just FYI. Key info was smartly kept one screen w/o having to swipe or hunt all over. Things weren't one main color where everything blended together and you did not have to pause and think so much over what should be instantly recognizable.

The new and improved flat design updated app went to all monochromatic blue with no more boxing-in of info but instead with large wasted space areas and oversize flat white circles that aren't obvious whether it's clickable or not, with hard to read small white or grey text. The app reviewers complain about removing some key features, like status of various alarms or sensors (you know, the things you need to know to use your system) but which must have been decided to be in the way of providing a clean, clutterless interface that looks consistent with all other poor ios7/8/9 design methods.

Iphone screens have never been easily readable outdoors on a sunny day and white text on blue and grey text on white is even harder to read. Instead of improving that thru maintaining good design focused on addressing that function, or at minimum, retaining the high-contrast appearance of pre-ios7, they made it worse and - as far as I can only guess - all for the sake of a misguided focus on consistency of appearance, fixing a problem that was never a problem. It's almost like they're trying to hide info. Very un-Apple like to put form way ahead of function, and it's them & Google whose flat approaches are spilling over to all the other lemmings websites feeling the need to keep up. The progression (regression) back to 1980's era UI & graphics by Apple and Google is such a mystery to me. I'm so curious to hear someone explain the merits of this new approach and what I'm just so obviously missing.

 

[Zoom]

The merits are, you dont need any designer to do your UI. Regular developers can code the app, and deliver it in one go. Even if you suck at design, you can successfully deliver a material design app, a kind of "democratization of UI" if you prefer. That's mostly it from my understanding. Sucks that Apple has been doing that, which is a clear opposite of their historical UI design rules (which were excellent by the way).

 

[Mac Attack]

I think it's a conspiracy to force us to the next step of human evolution (if you believe that stuff) - telekinetic powers.

MS Windows seems to work well on a phone platform. If only they had more developers and apps for it.

 

[Yinzer]

The merits are, you dont need any designer to do your UI. Regular developers can code the app, and deliver it in one go. Even if you suck at design, you can successfully deliver a material design app, a kind of "democratization of UI" if you prefer. That's mostly it from my understanding. Sucks that Apple has been doing that, which is a clear opposite of their historical UI design rules (which were excellent by the way).

I know you can't assume or speak for others, but even if a small part of dumbing down UI & graphics at the expense of appearance quality and ease of use was even partially justified by being able to let even a caveman code an app/website/program, then maybe just like Trump & Hillary being the best we can do, perhaps this is a sign that we're all done here and the apocalypse is coming. I always believed that all the dumbing down of UI via Windows 10, ios7, google material design was 100% marketing or designers feeling restless and jonesing for the need to innovate, either to try to stand out from the competition or to just make their jobs interesting again by solving problems that really weren't problems in the first place, misguidingly applying apple's successful use of hardware minimalism design to software design. Or in the case of Jony Ive, to appease his ego which was kept in check until Jobs passed and Forestall got forced out.

 

[Yinzer]

My workplace decided to move from Microsoft messenger to a Skype messenger program. MS Messenger looked like it hadn't been updated in five years, still had some 3D looking UI elements that effectively separated functional areas of the app, but it worked perfectly for what it needed to do. This week I've heard nothing but complaints and grumbles from coworkers about Skype being confusing to use with its white, light blue, and darker blue flat design that provides no clue as to where to start to do anything. Of course nobody complained directly about the monochrome boring unintuitive flat UI like me here; they just complained about it being difficult to understand how to do things that were obvious before and a little less clear to follow since the talker and listener text bubbles were about the same color. And of course, some functionality looks to have been removed for the sake of a clean design interface, I can only assume. No more sketchpad or emoticons.

So for any anybody here who has any decision-making power in the world of apps and OS/iOS/Windows: can we all just move on past this awful flat design monochromatic clean interface fad and go back to things being designed to work good and not just look clean? You can be the modern version of Apple's 1984 commercial and throw a hammer into a photo of Jony Ive.

Really, can anybody answer: with virtual reality being all about trying to look and feel exactly like the real world, why is it ok for iOS, OS, Windows, Android, etc., to be all about being as flat and far away from reality as possible (and also strangely looking way too similar - doesn't anyone find it funny that the upgraded Facebook app on iPhone looks exactly like the iPhone text messenger interface)? Is there some underground conspiracy group or illuminati in charge of making the world less better and who's also in charge of selecting Democratic and Republican presidential candidates? Can't you just go back to chemtrails and hiding ufo's?

Seriously, who can actually defend the current UI design trend?

PS I recognize that life is pretty good right now if this is the biggest thing I can complain about this AM!

 

[Mac Attack]

Seriously, who can actually defend the current UI design trend?

PS I recognize that life is pretty good right now if this is the biggest thing I can complain about this AM!

Young hipsters focus on making it trendy, and they convince upper management that's what consumers want.

I'm surprised you haven't said anything about SAP.

 

[Yinzer]

Young hipsters focus on making it trendy, and they convince upper management that's what consumers want.

Probably in many cases. Though many upper management are relatively young in their 40's & 50's and shouldn't be so easily bamboozled, if that indeed is the case. Though I'm still utterly amazed the gross looking & step-backwards-working iOS7 made it thru some supposed smart middle & upper management at Apple. No wise board member or senior VP raised their hand and questioned the functionality to not be a step forward, and with silly dayglo fisher price looks?

I'm surprised you haven't said anything about SAP.

Oh I've grown numb to SAP. With me not being a project manager, I luckily only have to endure it for 5 minutes a week for time entry. It's awful and most every coworker feels that way. If you're working on more than 5 projects you have to scroll up & down instead of being presented with at least 10 rows of entry on one screen by default without having to scroll. Shocked that a database entry interface used by millions isn't "good" and is just purely awful. My buddy is an SAP sales rep and as we relaxed at a recent christening party he complained more about it than me! I'm just going to stop and hope each day is a step back towards good UI that isn't so frustrating and joyless to use. I refuse to upgrade my macbook air past Mavericks until they bring back the non-fisher price appearance and return to lickable red/yellow/green buttons in the top borders. Yosemite & whatever is the latest OS just look so unpolished.

 

[Mac Attack]

I know one of the VP's in Germany, so I can't really say much more about it. I remember as a business-manager-in-training at the big W how I had to learn about setting up cost centers and stuff like that for projects. Now I only have to use it for expense reimbursements and the occasional timesheet entry if I have to charge overtime.

A previous employer of mine spent millions upgrading the SAP UI and it didn't turn out much better.

 

[Yinzer]

big W [\QUOTE]

The big W as in - Westinghouse?

 

[clutch1]

I agree so much with this thread. The pursuit of 'modernization' in logos and apps and all those things seems like it insults my intelligence in some subliminal way.

This really sums up my view on it, I think.

And Geek Squad's cool new logo they outsourced to have designed comes complete with a nice side-boob silhouette (k). Edgy. Make sure to compliment them next time you take your computer in for service.

Minimalist..modernist..the only way for society to advance into a glorious glorious future.

 

[Tom239]

And... why does the new NSX have dumbed-down temperature gauges?

It's nice that the NSX now has both oil and coolant temperature gauges
but what was Honda thinking. The cars the NSX is competing against
have temperature gauges labeled in degrees. The NSX tells you that
outdoor temperature is 21ºC but oil temperature is "not too hot".

 

[Yinzer]

To Honda's credit, at least they stuck with "skeumorphism" and created an attractive-looking e-gage that mimics an easy-to-read analog/manufactured gage....had they gone the Google/Jony Ive route with a light blue font on a grey background flat design (with some gradient), I would have lost all faith in Honda like I did with Apple starting with iOS7.

Every website I encounter with light grey hard to read font on a bright white background makes me want to beat an effigy of Jony Ive with a grey baseball bat until he's light black and light blue all over.

 

[Tom239]

To Honda's credit, at least they stuck with "skeumorphism" and created an attractive-looking e-gage that mimics an easy-to-read analog/manufactured gage....had they gone the Google/Jony Ive route with a light blue font on a grey background flat design (with some gradient), I would have lost all faith in Honda like I did with Apple starting with iOS7.

Yes at least the colors are legible but I don't see why it's to Honda's credit that it's skeumorphic.

I mean, imagine they did the same thing with the outdoor temperature gauge.
Imagine it looked like a dial (or a column of colored alcohol) and had no numbers on it.

If the challenge Honda was dealing with here was a limited amount of space
to put the various gauges in, I'd have preferred they made the temperatures digital.
And I suspect anyone who tracked the car would prefer that too (it'd be more
important to know what the oil temperature is than that the gauge be skeumorphic).

 

[Yinzer]

Even though I agree with you -- I'd prefer #'s there too -- I think Honda deserves a lot of credit for putting out a gage set that at least looks "real" and bucks the trend being followed by all the other lemmings in the design world...I see a 5% fail here, not a 100% fail like the ios7/8/9 & OSX Yosemite & Google material design flat awful abortion of a UI design philosophy. And at least it's white numbers on a black background with a red redline as God intended, instead of some jackassery black numbers on a white background or light blue thin tiny font on a grey gradient background.

 

[Yinzer]

I've been noticing that my mother calls me for ipad questions much more frequently after each ios "upgrade." A common theme seems to be: things that used to be simple or obvious keep changing into being hidden, non-intuitive, and/or completely removed.

Here are reasons #628-634 why I question & dislike so many of Apple's UI "improvements" since Jony Ive & Tim Cook's ascension/decent over the Apple that I used to so enjoy.


628. You can no longer simply update your password for ipad/iphone email accounts in iOS Settings: Now you have to delete the account and re-enter it...with no clear indication that this is the method, until you search it online...

629. Removal of magsafe, merely one of the smartest laptop inventions ever from back when Apple could innovate. This is like removing cruise control from vehicles.

630. Dongles, dongles dongles. Forcing customers to be courageous enough to fork out more money for dongles in order to support Jony Ive's addiction to thinness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XSC_UG5_kU

631. No plug-n-play option to use an ipad as a second monitor to your MacBook. Instead you're forced to by an app (an electronic dongle) to make it happen, like the "Duet Display" app which I'm going to try later tonight.

632. How Apple's post-Jobs unrestrained obsession with uber-minimalistic form-over-function has bled into general web design, resulting in bland, space-wasting websites like those for Duet Display: Light grey and light blue font over a lot of wasted white space with lots of unnecessary but artsy large photos requiring too much scrolling to read what used to be smartly contained on one page/screen. Consistent with Jony Ive's blindness to over-complicating things that used to be simple and intuitive, just for the sake of a clean minimalist design.
Examples:
http://www.duetdisplay.com/pro/#
http://qz.com/822126/apple-aapl-rem...est-invention-ever-from-the-new-macbook-pros/

633. Jony Ive minimalized away the rotating clock icon atop the screen which used to cleanly show when time machine was backing up. Now it's just a static indication, not at all intuitive and encouraging the user to perform more clicks to assure himself/herself that backup was being performed, especially the first time he/she discovers this design "improvement" and has no idea what's going on. Again, consistent with requiring more steps to perform what used to take a glance or single click, just for the sake of being different from Steve Jobs / Scott Forestall. Idiot.
https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/why-your-time-machine-icon-isnt-spinning-in-the-status-bar/

634. Apple replaced the community bulletin board's clean & organized interface with an artsy space-wasting interface that hides a lot of key info while looking like a form letter and, like #633 , requires way too much scrolling for what used to be easily contained on a single screen view.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/26976024#26976024
@Lud @NSXPRIME Please, please do not ever revise NSXPrime's bulletin board towards anything like #634 !!


Consistent with my whining in post #1 in this thread: I'd be so impressed with anyone who can prove how any of the above changes are improvements who's pros outweigh the cons! Seriously, how can things keep getting worse instead of just staying good like they used to be. What's going on here!

 

[Tom239]

I wonder whether Apple has hit the point where there is nothing left to do but decline.
From an article in the New Yorker about Apple's new headquarters building:

When companies plan wildly ambitious, over-the-top headquarters, it is sometimes a sign of imperial hubris. A.T. & T. was broken up not too long after it moved into Johnson and Burgee’s famously grandiose “Chippendale skyscraper” on Madison Avenue. General Foods did not last too long after taking occupancy of the glass-and-metal palace Kevin Roche designed for it in Westchester County, and Union Carbide fell apart after it moved into another Roche building in Danbury, Connecticut. The New York Times Company’s stock price plummeted after it moved into its Renzo Piano building on Eighth Avenue, and they now lease the home they built for themselves.

Architecture isn’t in itself a cause of corporate decline—that notion is ridiculous—but overbearing buildings can sometimes be a symptom of companies losing touch with reality, and this problem will manifest itself in other ways.