Unnecessary borders create visual complexity that increases the load on perception, which reduces cognition. It's not a fad thing. It's usually covered by visual communications curriculums with regard to Gestalt principles, and is well researched by cognitive sciences.

Can you provide sources? I’m curious. Borders are everywhere from lane marks on the roads to art frames. I tried searching for sources on Google with no luck.

> Unnecessary borders create visual complexity that increases the load on perception, which reduces cognition

That's difficult to believe in if you remove the word "unnecessary". Logical grouping of similar components in a UI using a border can only help group them. The framework for grid-based design was laid out by Josef Muller-Brockmann and heavily influenced the swiss/intl design language.

You now need to define what constitutes "unnecessary" :) otherwise its talking past each other.

I'm not saying that borders are always wrong, but you are using a horrible example as an argument in favor of borders.

There are no borders in any of the examples in Josef Müller-Brockmann's Grid Systems except for in the pictographic signs used by the the Swiss Federal Railwaws, but they are not part of a grid.

Well, there are also borders, or rather literal guidelines, in all the sketches visualizing the grid, but they are of course only there as a tool. In all the grid layout examples the grid is implicit. All of them.

devil's advocate: HN is very minimalistic with design.

HN is brutalist, meaning raw, unvarnished. There's no excessive whitespace and no animations. It's minimal in the correct sense: as simple as possible, but no more.

The problem with many sites is that they're actually quite complex behind a façade of simplicity. Which means lots of wasted space, unnecessary clicks, and not finding what you're looking for.

HN is not brutalist, as that's not what brutalist means. Brutalist things are made with concrete. HN is pared back.

I think HN is just "undesigned" to be honest. I mean, look at the stylesheet - aside from some declarations to use Verdana, a few minimal concessions towards a mobile layout, and a bit of fiddling about with the voting arrows, there's hardly anything there.

I'm sure at this point the minimalism of HN probably is a conscious choice (as in, they have consciously chosen not to do anything to the design for however many years, despite, I'm sure, countless offers from aspiring designers), but how it originally came out was surely as a result of the people involved not wanting to put any energy into designing it or writing CSS.

Interesting observations regarding the "raw" aspects of HN. I definitely see that too and I would refer to it as "Brutalist" in the true sense of the word, but these days Brutalism in digital design refers to various experimental projects [1]; I would consider these works to be leaning towards fine arts than calling them "unadorned".

[1] https://brutalistwebsites.com/

There is a difference, minimalism for the sake of minimalism is what I was referring to.

HN is minimal but functional first.

I disagree, HN is everything opposite of what was originally described. I can go look at youtube & come back to this site and see similarities with the design choice.

This guy minimalisms?

It's definitely much harder to get the kids off a borderless lawn.