I could swear I read in essence the same article about movies being all orange/teal a couple or three years ago.
EDIT: oh, that was 2013 actually. Ironically O'Brother gets the blame for that too.
https://shootandcut.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/teal-and-orange...
Consider it a warning before you visit the site.
This article quotes a researcher on this topic:
> A rectangle with sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort than for example an ellipse of the same size. Our ‘fovea-eye’ is even faster in recording a circle. Edges involve additional neuronal image tools. The process is therefore slowed down.¹
> sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort
I have my doubts about this. It is 100% fad IMO.
And how Windows 11 lists rounded windows and corners as a "signature feature"!
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/signatu...
That's at least a decade after the W3C had a well-developed concept of relative units for use with the CSS:
https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.html#future (2010)
Thus, with a sufficiently high DPI display, you're going to miss out on one of Windows 11's "signature experiences" and end up with "legacy" squarish corners instead.
> Because of how the scaling system works, when you design your UWP app, you're designing in effective pixels, not actual physical pixels. Effective pixels (epx) are a virtual unit of measurement, and they're used to express layout dimensions and spacing, independent of screen density. (In our guidelines, epx, ep, and px are used interchangeably.)
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/layout/...
Also, Windows scales the pixel size when you use a legacy application (non DPI aware) on high DPI displays.
My notifications pull-down fits about 3 useful notifications. The rest is whitespace and rounded corners 4 layers deep. It's horrible.
Design used to be a differentiating feature. Everything looks the same today. Kind of a Big Tech dystopia, even in design.
Before pill buttons, they were gray beveled rounded rectangles, be it native or web, on every platform.
I don't view now as being especially dominated by sameness versus the past.
Going even further back, the tacky wild fractal wallpaper backgrounds on websites with animated gif “under construction” banners on top.
Give it 5 years and iOS and android will get some visual refresh that makes the current stuff look very dated.
Fashion is constantly changing and being revisited. It’s just the way it is. Something about it is what makes humans what they are. We love it…
I recently learned this specific combo is called “bisexual lighting”:
Probably more late-00s than 2010s, but IIRC, the optical-flow slowdown effect was created (and cheaply) distributed.
Older slow-mo effects required high FPS cameras. But with 00s technology, you could optical-flow time warp to any slowdown you desired, with mostly good looking results. 300 (released in 2006) was the first popular film that did this, but IIRC the effect was being used in a lot of action films all over the place.
Slow-motion was definitely the "Oh wow, that looks cool, and it costs so cheap. Lets do it" effect of the 00s.
Does Spider-Man count in 2002?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCfdyroV7kc
This scene from 300 is very clearly just a wide-angle shot (initially), with someone playing with the Optical Flow timewarp effect (sliding it up and down). Its incredibly cheap.
See this demo in Premier Pro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErOc_LkZaIk
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That's the thing. 300's main innovation was using _cheap_ effects. Optical flow time-warp didn't appear on Premier for another few years, but the algorithm was popular and was just a custom filter / program that was getting passed around at that time.
Your point makes sense though, the commonization of frame interpolation is a landmark moment.
The orange and teal look is just a very widely used combination that utilizes complementary colors. Even though it's been used a lot i personally still find it quite appealing.
See "Be in my Video" song by Frank Zappa, Them or Us album [1984].
Visual artists are very fashion driven. As technology creates new possibilities, they get abused.
In the 80/90s music videos had fade/dissolve effects. Then in early 2000s a lot of them played with the aspect ratio "black bands" (like when you play 4:3 on 16:10), making them white, pink, or textured, with border lines and other effects.
In 2010s slow-motion (high FPS played back at regular speed) was the thing. So every other video had the slow motion "water/colored dust hitting something" scene.
Since 2015, color grading is the new fad. Also unnatural weird (LED) lighting, like the left half of the frame in strong red light and the right half in strong blue light.
Color grading is also infecting instagram. For example in city photography, there is quite a trend of grading them orange/teal.
There is also a lot of social pressure to color grade. If you don't, fellow artists will say something like "look at that peasant, he didn't grade his stuff, what a noob, putting out real colors, he probably doesn't even know what a LUT is".
And then you have the honest noob who tries to improve his skill, and he sees all the pros doing it, so he concludes that he should too, since all the pros can't be wrong, even if to his eyes the strongly color graded video kind of looks like shit, but he's just probably wrong and just needs to educate his aesthetics.
There will come a point when color grading will fell out of fashion, just like you rarely see a fade/dissolve or slow-motion effect today, and when they are used it's because they make sense, not because you must do it no matter what.