Submitted 10 hours ago by joeljoelle@piefed.blahaj.zone to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
https://piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone/posts/bu/J7/buJ7ggDdLRWrNHn.png
This dogshit zero information design is taking over everything and it sucks
This design looks so cheap to me, it’s just a bunch of random covers, there is no information about the movies presented in any way, the covers are way too big and take up an inordinate amount of space and there is nothing breaking up sections, design is just so fucking dumb now, fuck mobile
rant over 😅
Web/UI design in general has sucked for at least 14 years now. Everything is spaced too far apart and text/images are too big. Icons are used for critical functionality instead of words. Pointless animations and gradients slow everything down for no reason.
Mobile first! MoBiLE FiRsT!!!
What that?
AI?
AI FiRst!!
I think the main complaint is that your examples show detail about the movie, not just a close up of someone’s face
For example jaws has a giant shark attacking a boat. Compare that to a close up of Bane’s face. You might not even realize it’s a batman movie of you aren’t familiar with it already.
Star wars poster shows space ships and laser sword.
Many movie posters are just the main characters now with head shots vs trying to tell a story.
I don’t full agree with the op, just my interpretation of what I think they are complaining about
I can see it now that you mention it. Thanks for the insight!
You said it. Dogshit.
I’m so glad I’ve spent hte las tyears backing up the file of pretty much every bit of media I enjoy, because it’s the visual equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
My local movie theater in the heart of downtown has taken down the all movie posters outside the entrance and replaced them with a single screen that only shows ads for overpriced popcorn “deals”.
Before, anyone walking by knew which movies were currently playing; now, all they know is just how outrageously expensive the popcorn is.
I haven’t been to that theater since.
Dude come on… No one goes to the theater to find out what is playing there and no one has done that for well over a decade.
Your rant is silly.
Well, that’s how it was for me at least. The movie theater is right in the middle of town, which is why you’re constantly passing by it anyway. I don’t actively look up the current movie lineup, but I used to always be up to date because I passed by that theater almost every day and saw the posters.
Now I’m no longer informed about the current lineup, but instead only about the absurd prices for popcorn and stuff—I can’t say that motivates me to go to the theater’s website to see what’s playing.
Like I said: I haven’t been to the theater since they took down the posters. That’s not because tickets and popcorn would be too expensive for me, but because I have no idea which movies are playing right now. I don’t go out of my way to find out myself, but I used to walk past the theater and think, “Oh, cool, movie xyy is playing—I should go see that with friends this weekend.” That effect is now gone so I don’t go to the movies anymore.
You should tell them.
Yeah, I guess I should. I just can’t quite understand how anyone could fail to realize how absurd it is for a movie theater to use its most prominent advertising space not for promoting its movie lineup, but for food offerings.
To me, this strongly suggests that this movie theater—which is part of a large chain—now sees its main product as food rather than movies.
I have absolutely no sympathy for that, and I can only applaud it when a company like that loses customers because of its own idiocy.
I’m so here for this.
It’s genuinely infuriating to see a hundred years of movie poster art evolution discarded. It’s the first part of a movie’s artistic statement you ever see, and it gets summarily tossed in the trash so that Netflix’s internal overworked engagement metrics team can spend 2 minutes grabbing random shots of different stars in the film, slap single-color generic font text all over it, and target twelve versions to different demographics to try to get more clicks.
It’s even worse when I tell this to someone and they’re like, “I don’t really notice.”
Oh my goodness thank you I finally feel vindicated like no one around me ever mentions anything about it, I do need some more friends lol, but yeah as someone who does design and appreciates good design and knows what a hell creatives put them through to go through the process of making something people love and then it all gets reduced to garbage like this
Which of these just have a single colour generic font on them that isn’t literally the movies chosen font?
This isn’t the first time the aesthetic trend of film posters changed but I‘m sure every time it happened there was someone being grumpy about it.
I’m finding myself having to guide people through UIs that have random symbols instead of an obvious word that says what it does.
It’s annoying and getting worse.
You can easily use a word button to point to a side out menu with words, all language localised, that will actually make sense to a user instead of causing a tech anxiety attack!
I shouldn’t have to scout and translate a UI for someone. If there’s one bright side to all the AI being pushed at users is that it’s at least able to communicate with actual text, and usually wants to be user-friendly instead of hostile.
One of the programs I use at work had an overhaul recently. I wanted to find some notes from a previous day and couldn’t figure out how. I asked someone to help and they told me to click some symbol in the corner of the page. I didn’t even know it was supposed to be a button, hovering over it doesn’t say what it does. It looked kind of like [ iii ] which tells me absolutely nothing about its functionality.
The overhaul was supposed to make things easier.
I’m not seeing the relevance here? Where are the symbols that need translating here? Every single movie has the name written on it in plain English.
It’s part of the infuriating trend on removing all words from UIs. God forbid the kids learn how to read a movie title. Using modern apps means navigating a never ending stream of hieroglyphs. The “save”, “load”, “new”, “share” buttons are long gone; replaced with an ever changing series of symbols.
Am I looking at a different picture to all of you? Every single movie poster there has the name in plain English.
Every.
Single.
One.
Are you all illiterate?
A lot of posters have stylized script in varying sizes and contrast to the background that generally looked fine on big posters but can be hard to read on small icons on a screen.
Just look at the Dune one in the example. Only the u and n are easy to see because the d and e habe no contrast with the background and the font is heavily stylized. Which Lord Rings and Hobbit movies are those? The subtitles are tiny as fuck.
It’s all about driving metrics now. If people need to click on/select a movie to see more about it then that adds numbers to page views and increases time spent in the app. They can also see who and how many do or don’t watch a movie after clicking on it to further drive their algorithms.
Yeah that makes since, they don’t even have the mouse over information anymore you gotta click thru
Social media told me gradeschoolers can’t read now. I guess they don’t want all those nonsense symbols everywhere.
It’s the Windows 8 Metro UI.
Metro UI included titles (inside the tile), so it very much isn’t. It may be inspired, but it’s like “let’s take elements of the design and make it worse”
I guess this should incentivize me to click them?
Well, it doesn’t. It’s just noise i ignore, because there’s too much of it in the net anyway.
Unpopular opinion: I want as little information as possible before watching a movie. At the other end of the spectrum, we have trailers which basically spoil the whole film. The only information I want about a movie is whether it’s interesting, which I will get from audience sentiment online, and the only information I really need is the title.
Any additional information is either irrelevant to the movie experience, or a spoiler. Yeah I’m a weird little freak, and I like low-information posters. It’s better than posters which give away too much
…everyone of those tells you the name of the movie.
Which movie poster in OP doesn’t have the name spelled out in big ol’ plain English on it?
I do a similar thing with anime. I do read descriptions to know whether I’m interested or not, but I purposely do that a month before the next batch of anime starts airing. A month prior is late enough that anything that’s going to air during that season will have been announced already, while also being early enough that I’m likely to forget what the description said. I then make a Notepad list with what piqued my interest, and refer to that a month later.
And then yeah, I might add other shows on top of those from the opinions I hear online like you.
“Don’t tell me anything about it.”
searches the Metacritic score
Same design Steam etc use for their video game stores and libraries. Yeah. :<
And then combined it with thumbnails that change all the time because of A/B testing, which makes things even harder to recognize at a glance.
you can clearly tell the movie vibe from the cover design. you click on it, and can read the summary, or watch the trailer. move on with your life.
Really not seeing the issue here lol. Every single poster has the movie name on it in big legible text, and is either an official cover for the movie or official art of a main character with the official movie name text over it.
What exactly would you prefer?
Nope, you’re right, Joelle, this looks like hot stinky cat shit.
Fuck this design.
LOL like there is zero design elements at all besides the number, no flair, no color, no focus stealer, decades of design out the window lol
I’m pretty sure half of Lemmy is on a first-name basis at this point. :D
I need to search movies and stuff like a database, not algorithmically from the covers in a database. I need more detail than that.
Yup. And when you click in that, it will probably Start playing and not showing any information.
If it is HBO it will show you an ad for some other movie or show at a loud volume instead of the thing you picked!
Yea it kinda goes to a page with a random crappy screenshot from the movie that doesn’t really say anything, and a really bad synopsis lol. I dunno if they are like, going to lock away all the information soon or what
Doesn’t piss me off as much as media players that show you what happens in the next episode as it’s loading
Even if this is to drive engagement by clicking on items to gauge interest and collect metrics, I still don’t see how that’s more important than simply counting views and making an interface that’s simple and pleasurable to use. I guess maybe the lack of proper market competition would allow this? This would be enough for me to leave the platform. (I’m running Jellyfin anyway.)
Well I’m certainly not paying for it haha. Yeah I agree, It’s just too bad that once again all the color and joy has to be taken out of something and replaced with boring corporate bullshit. Like web design in the 90s was fun and experimental and there are all different kinds of sites and everyone had different ideas and they were all valid, it was a blast, but I guess that’s kind of how things go once you’re given unlimited options. Working with just the constraints of HTML was challenging and then CSS came along and made things easier but then they just kept adding more shit to it and now it’s a bloat fest full of features that no designer will ever use to their potential because they don’t do creative design anymore, then they added all those JS frameworks and blah
To be fair, the frameworks allow you to accomplish stuff instead of just coding. The frameworks where inevitable. Doing anything at all that wouldn’t be spaghetti in pure JavaScript would have resulted in in-house frameworks anyway, otherwise every single project would have become completely unmanageable. Even with native custom web components, there just so much overhead in creating them and maintaining them. As well as performance impacts. So frameworks where always an inevitable evolution of the web, as it became, IMO.
But we need native stuff. Standardized better ways of dealing with components that are less clunky than they have been for years now.
Aaanyway 😅, yeah, these things come and go in waves. Minimal design, flashy shit, minimal, flashy. Hopefully they’ll realize it’s a shit interface to use in the long-run, assuming they even use their own service. (Bet you the employees don’t even get their service for free.)
We were discussing how nice it was in the good old days to go into a rental shop and just look for movies based on the covers. Sure this design doesn’t really hit that itch but more information is not always better.
It’d be nice to just have a bunch of movies that are just random within their main category. No algorithms or marketing.
You can watch any movie you want as long as it’s Mortal Kombat.
Are there really three Mortal Kombat movies in the top 10 on Netflix??
This is HBO MAX, I know it looks exactly the same haha, and yes I think so, this movie platform is so confusing because they have a decent amount of classic cinema, a sprinkling of good modern movies, and then just a bunch of garbage blockbusters like that. It’s like they’re trying to do to much or it’s in the middle of a transition, they will probably dump all those old classics soon I’m sure
It’s probably not even designed persay anymore just algorithmically generated all the way through, what a feat lol
sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
UI’s for movie streaming services are not designed to help you find something to watch. They are designed to keep you “engaged”, which means in the platform and not realizing that the pool of actually interesting things is about as deep as a puddle. Everything about streaming sites’ design is user hostile and this is a classic example of that.
psx_crab@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
Isn’t Jellyfin the same design as all the streaming platform and they have nothing to gain for keeping you engaged?
yakko@feddit.uk 8 hours ago
Yeah but they don’t have highly paid UX design teams, so they’re probably just copying design choices on the basis that they’re trying to offer people a similar experience they can own.
darkwing_duck@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
Almost, but it has movie titles under the poster/cover and usually pulls the actual movie covers.
Once you click into it, it gives a shitton of detail about the movie.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 7 hours ago
Jellyfin has like six different view types to pick from, including one that doesn’t even show images. And almost all the others show the title always visible below the preview image.
PatrickYaa@feddit.org 7 hours ago
Jellyfin a) only has the content you feed it, so you already have some knowledge about it and b) you can expand it with plugins and make the design however you like it.
AbsolutelyClawless@piefed.social 6 hours ago
Everything others said, plus you can choose your client. For example, I use VoidTV for Jellyfin on my TV which offers a different design (though I use it because it’s the only Jellyfin client where DD video+audio work).
joeljoelle@piefed.blahaj.zone 9 hours ago
Yeah I suppose, you just gotta pick one thing and then it does the rest, or that’s what they want probs