The Flat Sink

by sgdesign • 14 years ago

260 147 14 years ago

zefhous2• 14 years ago

I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the Middle East flat kitchen sinks are standard and ubiquitous. I wouldn't be so quick to assume that it's an aesthetic design decision — I bet it's more of a cultural preference.

I don't like flat sinks, but I can see how some people do. In Lebanon they generally build large flat sinks right into the countertop with the same marble. They are much larger than most American sectioned sinks and are good for certain things. They use a small squeegee to clean up after everything is done.

gyardley• 14 years ago

Flat (edit: okay, flatish) kitchen sinks, as opposed to bathroom sinks, are ubiquitous in North America too. In the kitchen, the flat sink is useful for dish-stacking.

chewxy• 14 years ago

kitchen sinks are deeper too, so splashes are minimized.

Also, my kitchen sink is actually slightly slanted towards the sink hole.

SideburnsOfDoom3• 14 years ago

They're not flat, they slope slightly down to the plughole. It's a design compromise that allows for both dish-stacking and for drainage.

sudonim• 14 years ago

Minor point, but he's talking about a bathroom in his parent's house in Paris, not where he lives in Osaka, Japan.

Hadn't seen the lebanese style sinks before, but a quick google image search brought up this pic: http://www.lebanon-hotels.com/book/images/accom/Faraya-villa... . Is that what you mean?

Interesting to hear another perspective.

zefhous2• 14 years ago

Thanks, skimmed over that I suppose.

Yes, that's exactly it. I find them pretty annoying because water and food debris builds up in the corners and it's hard to get it all down. Could actually be a feature and not a bug, — I've never seen a garbage disposal there, so you don't want all the food going right down the drain.

zem• 14 years ago

you see those in india too, especially in older houses and rural areas.

deelowe3• 14 years ago

Kitchen sinks are a bit different. They are deeper, you don't shave in them, and they are typically sloped a bit so that they don't get small pools of standing water. These new bathroom sinks are pretty bad. They are really trendy in hotels along with the water found style sinks and the ones that look like a bowl sitting on top of the counter top. Every one is a regression in usability solely for the sake of aesthetics.

One day we'll look back on this design trend and laugh. Too bad it will take decades before these poorly designed items are replaced in homes and hotels.

sgdesign6• 14 years ago

Yes! And those bowl-shaped ones don't even have a ledge to put your toothbrush holder on!

Gravityloss• 14 years ago

Most "design" nowadays is like that. It's actually styling, not design. Real design concerns functionality and usability first.

DanBC• 14 years ago

A traditional kitchen sink style is "The Belfast Sink" - an image search shows these to be big and flat style sinks. Not it's not just in the Middle East.

pcrh• 14 years ago

In the UK these kinds of sink were/are often used in conjunction with a smaller bowl that went into the sink [1] (less often these days). The sink has multiple functions in addition to washing cutlery, plates, etc. Sometime quite large things are washed in the sink, however when typical dish-washing is being done, a smaller bowl in placed in the sink to economize on hot water as well as to bring about the other advantages that OP claims for a curved sink.

[1] http://www.lakeland.co.uk/p21352/Sink-Bowls

[2] http://quezi.com/12083

idan• 14 years ago

Same in Israel, with the caveat that households which keep kosher often have two sinks side-by-side; one for meat and one for dairy.

jlgreco2• 14 years ago

In the US I often see kitchens that have two "sinks" with one faucet in the middle. Usually one of the sinks holds a drying rack.

lobster_johnson• 14 years ago

Flat kitchen sinks work mostly because the facuet in kitchens usually swivel, so that you can move the flow of water to flush things out of the corners.

In my own apartment I have a directional, tilting head [1] attachment. It lets you point the water stream anywhere within the sink, and it has a secondary mode that turns the stream into a wider shower-style spray.

I have a flat sink in my bathroom. It's slighty sloped, but that doesn't help much against gunk collecting in the corners; it's awful precisely because the faucet doesn't swivel, and the faucet is one of those low, short bathroom types, so adding that same attachment would not help much.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/XKdED.jpg

hahainternet• 14 years ago

The most irony I found on this page is where an image annotation berated Google for their flat design, at the same time as having a distracting background image, unexplained bolding of the first letters of 'Google Reader' and generally distracting and disorienting design.

sgdesign6• 14 years ago

I would like to officially formulate this new law:

"Any blog post criticizing a design will in turn see its own design criticized."

deelowe3• 14 years ago

One does not need to be an expert to be critical. I just bought a new coffee table and spend hours selecting one based on the joints, finish, type of wood, price, etc... I know how to pick good furniture. That doesn't mean I know how to build a quality table.

Also, the cobbler's kids have no shoes!

dryicerx• 14 years ago

A best of both worlds would be a flat sink that's angled/sloped towards the wall

SideburnsOfDoom3• 14 years ago

I've seen those in restaurant lavatories.

The disadvantage is that when filling a sink e.g. for shaving, the water pools at a line rather than a point. this is obviously not a problem in a restaurant.

See the third illustration "With a flat sink, you need more water to get the same depth" - an angled flat surface would be somewhere between the two in efficiency of water use.

randallsquared• 14 years ago

I think if I were going to shave this way, I'd use a bowl instead of putting a lot of water into a presumably-not-perfectly-clean sink. You could wash a bowl and put it away after, whereas you'd have to wash the sink immediately before each shave. If the designer of the sink expected using a shaving bowl, the flat bottom would make a lot of sense.

ssmoot• 14 years ago

I've seen ones like that. They've generally been stone countertops with custom sinks with low-pressure fixtures that don't have aerators.

Very expensive custom work though. The fixtures alone are probably $2K. So yeah, I'll stay with my $50 Moen for awhile yet. :-)

arscan• 14 years ago

I'm not going to comment on the message as a whole, since this whole flat aesthetic thing has been argued up and down on HN over the last few months. But there was one line that stuck out to me as being a little off:

> Get rid of all texture, and you might end up with cold, sterile designs that scare users away.

I'm on board with the usability argument, but I don't think that removing gradients and drop shadows necessarily results in designs that "scare users away." If anything, I think that abandoning realism allows you more freedom in making a warm & inviting designs (e.g. some downright unnatural combinations of pastels that would look too busy with those touches of realism).

masklinn• 14 years ago

> I'm on board with the usability argument, but I don't think that removing gradients and drop shadows necessarily results in designs that "scare users away."

He didn't talk about gradients or drop shadows, he talked about textures. Wood grain is texture, the paper fibers in most book pages are texture, ... There is such a thing as too much texture, but there is also such a thing as not enough texture: when there's no texture, the work feels dead, like holding a single chord forever.

no_more_death• 14 years ago

I've noticed that most large companies go for a sterile look. Google, Microsoft, etc. I've always thought of Apple design as sterile as well.

Getting off track, Apple design is simply not a monolithic, "zen" one-stroke entity. Apple design amalgamates understated hardware with loud, lickable user interfaces. To see my point, consider that Apple hardware is definitely NOT lickable, whereas software generally is. Historically this may be due to the dissonance between Forstall (software design) and Ive (engineering design).

(Feel free to shred me as I don't really know anything about Apple design.)

gnaffle2• 14 years ago

The interesting thing is that the new Apple hardware starting with the iMac certainly started out as lickable, and very similar to the original OSX software (with pinstripes and all). Both the software (OSX) and hardware has gradually become more and more clean and "sterile" with time. The exceptions have mainly been certain applications and a few UI widgets / icons.

pixl97• 14 years ago

but I don't think that removing gradients and drop shadows necessarily results in designs that "scare users away."

Try using Office 2013. It's white and flat (even flatter in Win8 over Win7, you lose refrence to what the 'tools' part and the data part is. It is not inviting at all, unless you dig in to the options and try to put some slightly different colors/textures on it.

jongold• 14 years ago

It fails because it's been designed by idiots, not because it's 'flat'

pazimzadeh• 14 years ago

He said might end up.

Semiapies2• 14 years ago

The "might" there is simply a weasel word for the opinion presented.

uxwtf• 14 years ago

You can for sure create a nice design without using any texture, but still from UX point of view, depending on the complexity of the user interface, buttons with shadows will be more visible and easy to recognize for a user than flat rectangles. It is especially important when designing UI for buying things and making payments.

jimsilverman• 14 years ago

author seems to be confusing visual styling with hierarchy and information architecture. it's harmless to remove gradients and shadows, but removing context and visual priority is what makes the sink flat.

ebf11• 14 years ago

>Put everything on the same plane, and you make it harder to focus on a specific section of the page.

Citation needed.

Edit: Since I'm getting downvoted, tell me that https://svbtle.com/ content isn't on the same plane and still readable? You can have everything on the same plane and with proper use of whitespace and good typography, it can be very readable.

Other examples:

http://daringfireball.net/

https://medium.com/about/9e53ca408c48

Hacker News

tejaswiy• 14 years ago

Not quite sure why this is being downvoted .. valid point?

sgdesign6• 14 years ago

I didn't say that it was impossible to have good content hierarchy with a flat design, I just said it was harder.

And "citation needed" is the Hacker News equivalent of YouTube comments: snarky, doesn't bring anything to the debate, and totally irrelevant.

ebf11• 14 years ago

Is it actually harder though? I don't think so. I think there is some truth to the idea that content over chrome is a good usability principle (obviously to an extent, Win8 takes it a little too far sometimes), and in my opinion, it is easier to learn proper use of whitespace and good typography than how to make textures and less "sterile" designs.

My point is you are stating your opinion as if it is a truth, when it isn't.

Sure, citation needed is a little snarky, but I disagree that it doesn't bring anything to the debate and is irrelevant. Maybe you could have pointed to usability studies, so there would at least be some data to back up your claim.

jamesbritt2• 14 years ago

I see "Citation needed" as a reminder that hn is not youtube and that claims that are not obviously anecdotal need backing support.

baddox4• 14 years ago

"Citation needed" is absolutely snarky, in the sense that it is highly critical. And it should be used consistently and unapologetically. Would you be snarky in your response to someone accusing you of being a witch? I hope so, and I hope you would point out that some evidence would be nice.

Snarkily requesting evidence is not a bad quality in an online community—it's a vital one. Stating things as facts and refusing to even attempt to provide evidence is a bad quality.

If you claim that flat interfaces are more difficult to use, and someone else claims the opposite, how do you each attempt to justify your positions? Do you compete to see who can more quickly compare their opponents to YouTube commenters, or do you simply cite some evidence to corroborate your position?

richardwhiuk• 14 years ago

On a slightly different note, I find svbtle poor design.

My eyes keep getting distracted by the elements in the top left and right corner of the page.

With both of them, it isn't obvious what will happen if they are pressed. To me, it feels exactly what the author of this article was dismissing - design for design's sake, which make the site less usable than if they'd made it clear what they do.

RivieraKid• 14 years ago

Google Reader's top-level hierarchy is: 1) black menu bar 2) Google bar 3) options bar 4) left panel 5) list of items. The first problem is, that the logical structure is unnecessarily complicated, but that's not the point.

The second problem is, that there's almost no visual distinction / contrast between the main segments of the page, which makes it harder to process mentally. It's like a file manager that shows the filesystem as a flat list of files instead of as a hierarchy of folders. My first impression of the new Reader or Gmail design was - messy bunch of black texts on white or almost-white background plus some almost invisible gray lines and a weird red button. It just seems messy and structureless.

Svbtle or HN are different, they have much simpler top level structure - just a menu and a list of items. BTW, svbtle's design is superior to Reader's on multiple level's.

jmilloy• 14 years ago

The "citation needed" is one of my favorite know-it-all, over-objective "hacker" sort of memes. It's just hilarious. Not everything that is true or helpful has or needs a citation. Are you really asking for a citation to a controlled study that measures readability of a flat and not flat designs?

And more than that, if you disagree, don't pretend to ask for a citation, just explain why you disagree. Most likely, even if you can't admit it, you'll find that you don't disagree, you are just misinterpreting.

In this case, the statement is

- an opinion based on experience

- obviously true

- coupled with an example anyways

In addition, the statement is relative, allowing for successful designs that are flat. So examples of readable flat designs are irrelevant to the truth of the statement.

You probably received down votes because "citation needed" is lazy, uninformative, uninteresting, and, in this case, wrong.

ebf11• 14 years ago

Fair enough, but considering I clarified why I said citation needed 14 hours before you posted and 5-10 minutes after I made the original comment, the fact that you and others are still attacking this statement, rather than the points I brought up, seems a bit silly to me.

Sure, I could have provided this clarification earlier, but I have already conceded that the original comment was snarky and lacking in context for such a short statement.

And to your specific comments:

>Are you really asking for a citation to a controlled study that measures readability of a flat and not flat designs?

Are you suggesting that this isn't testable? I guarantee Microsoft and others have tested it. If the author isn't prepared to provide data, then it should be presented as an opinion.

"I believe that..."

> - obviously true

If it is obviously true, then there must be data to back it, right?

>In addition, the statement is relative, allowing for successful designs that are flat. So examples of readable flat designs are irrelevant to the truth of the statement.

My point was in regards to this particular statement, which, in my opinion, is stated as a truth:

>Put everything on the same plane, and you make it harder to focus on a specific section of the page.

I've agreed in later comments that you can take "content over chrome" too far in UI design, but this statement is NOT necessarily true in regards to content existing on the same plane. Putting everything on the same plane does not mean that it is harder to focus on a specific section of the page. Poorly designed websites are hard to read, regardless of what plane the content exists. I merely pointed out that there are examples that do not fit this viewpoint. In fact, I would argue that these examples tend to be the most readable designs I've seen, but this is an opinion that I have, so I have made sure to clarify it merely as that: an opinion.

As I've posted below, I am tired of people posting articles or blogs (and others upvoting these posts) that are not backed by any data.

If something is posted as an opinion, then I agree that it doesn't need a citation. Unfortunately, there is a reoccurring theme that I've seen become more and more prevalent in the tech community, a theme where ideas are pushed as truths when the author has done nothing to show that there is actual, credible, merit to the conclusions that have been drawn.

If these ideas were presented in any academic circle without evidence, they would be disregarded and laughed at. Yet here we are, discussing a post with a +200 upvote count, and the author has done little to prove his or her point, besides cherry pick examples that suit his or her conclusions. Content existing on another plane MAY improve readability, but I cannot say for certain. But I can point out that there are some very readable websites that have their content and navigation exist all one one page.

I think we can all agree that bad design leads to bad readability. And content existing on the same plane isn't inherently bad design. Proper use of whitespace and good typography can go a long way to improving readability and the UX. See Bing results http://www.bing.com/search?q=hello+world&go=&qs=n... (although I'm not a big fan of their social sidebar, but the results page and the top level navigation, is in my opinion, very usable)

So why should anyone accept this presentation of ideas that are not prefaced with the fact that they are an opinion and are not backed by any data? Why is it snarky to ask for evidence of these ideas, yet in academia it is normal and encouraged to be skeptical? If I presented an idea to my boss, his first question would be where is the data to support this? If I proposed an idea to my advisor, he would ask why do I believe this and what is the supporting evidence for this claim.

Why are these types of posts continually upvoted? Is it because we want agree with the author's idea? Is it because others have already upvoted this, so therefore the author is probably right? I honestly do not understand. It isn't like it is impossible to test this.

MaysonL• 14 years ago

Whenever I run into a blog with the un-subtle design, I hit the Readability bookmarklet: I can't stand the garish logos.

fudged71• 14 years ago

A functional interface needs to be understood. With each new interface you use, you load a new set of metaphors and interactions into your brain to help you navigate, understand, and use whatever it is that you are using. The interface needs to be relatable, or at least offer an explanation of how to use it. Having more experience with interfaces will make you more familiar with different design patterns and such, but there is a limit to how much we can relate to.

This isn't about readability, but rather usability, so I find your examples poor. It's not just about typography and whitespace. Yes, they are simple and on the "same visual plane", but they follow design patterns that have existed on the web for many years: Navigation placement is on the top and left, links are either underlined or highlighted. On the other hand, svbtle is using bizarre navigation visual cues at the top which need some level of inspection or trust to use, and medium doesn't have a standard navigation at all. They are designing away elements of the webpage that people are familiar with.

njharman• 14 years ago

Zen and minimalism must vary by the observer...

A curve or spheroidal section is zen and minimal (1 stroke, 1 surface) A box with 5 sides, 4 corners, etc is not. There are zen circles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ens%C5%8D, few to none zen squares.

vacri3• 14 years ago

Only if you're defining minimalism as 'the literal least amount of noticeable features'. The picture in your link is a terrible example of 'minimalism' by that definition - while it describes a circle created in a single stroke, the actual pattern is extremely complex. Then there's also writing and three chops.

crazygringo2• 14 years ago

I stayed with a friend in a then-new building designed by Philippe Starck, in New York.

The bathroom sink faucet handles were very cool -- just smooth steel cylinders sticking out, that you rotated.

Until I tried turning them with my now-soapy hands... and discovered that they were impossible to turn, because there was nothing to grab onto! His stylish cylinders turned out to be completely useless. Turns out knobby handles exist for a reason.

eduardordm• 14 years ago

Still, someone will eventually call this a feature, because it might force you to dry your hands before turning the knob - keeping it cleaner/dry.

Designers will always find a way to justify their crap.

jlgreco2• 14 years ago

The correct comeback to that would be to assert that such a demand is unnecessarily environmentally unfriendly since it encourages a usage that wastes more water. Green is very stylish, arguably more stylish than standard aesthetics.

JacksonGariety• 14 years ago

It actually seems like a correct justification. It's greener, and forces a more logical way to use a product, even if it isn't familiar. That isn't a sin.

dredmorbius3• 14 years ago

The correct solution: foot pedals, as used in hospitals. Avoids contact-spread infections.

pretoriusB3• 14 years ago

Really? Where are these designers you mention? Can you point to any specific example of them justifying similar crap?

(And note that it has to be an actual "crap", not just stuff you personally don't like).

oh_sigh• 14 years ago

I never understood why people put soap on their hands before turning the water on. Why do you do this? Am I missing something here?

jstanley• 14 years ago

Since soap isn't even liquid on dry hands, I guess he started running the sink, then soaped up his hands to start washing, and tried to turn the taps off when the sink became full.

pablasso• 14 years ago

You can use liquid soap. And for dry soap I tend to just open the water a couple of seconds, close it, soap my hands and then wash it away again.

There's really no need to let the water run all the time, that's a waste.

progrock3• 14 years ago

I'm a fan of foot controlled faucets. I'll talk to my plumber about the possibility of getting some tomorrow.

nicfarley• 14 years ago

Pretty sure if you speak to the tap in parselmouth it starts shooting out water.

jorde• 14 years ago

I noticed the same kind of faucets at my friend's place in SF's Mint Plaza (probably one of the most expensive condos in the city). It blew my mind how hard to use they were, even without soap, with just wet hands.

Overall I think that modern design has had a negative impact on kitchen and bathroom utilities: much of the functionality is lost with minimalistic design. There's also quite a lot of difference between countries and most bathroom faucets etc I have encountered in the US are horrible to use. It's also surprising why infrared activated faucets aren't more popular, they can't be that much more expensive for public restrooms (they are everywhere in the Nordics). I could go on forever about this subject as it's such an everyday thing affecting millions of people.

sgdesign6• 14 years ago

We have an infrared-activated faucet in our Japanese kitchen sink and it's really great!

henrikschroder• 14 years ago

I feel your pain on bathroom faucets, I have a fantastic one-grip faucet that I can operate even with my elbow if I so wish. When things like that exist, why oh WHY would anyone buy two-grip faucets, or worse, BAD two-grip faucets?

Another point of horror is trends in design that cause some feature to just not exist anymore. Ten years ago I bought a combined microwave/kitchen fan, that had a great digital wheel for setting the time. It had the right size, and weight and feel, and it was really easy to set the timer because you developed muscle-memory really fast.

But a few years ago I moved, and had to buy a new microwave, and since a few years had passed, digital wheel were now "out" and almost impossible to find ovens that had them. Because suddenly the shitty +/- buttons where "in" again, and I was just out of luck.

justjimmy• 14 years ago

I am not a fan of infrared faucets - it completely strips away control from the user.

You can't dictate the amount of water - whether you want a trickle or a gush of water. You can't dictate if you just want to leave it on (for whatever reason) unless you leave your hands in that magical spot. O the magical spot, waving around your hands around the sink, feeling like a total idiot (not to mention learning the magical spot of different infrared faucets, since I'm seeing them in public restrooms and airports now), and if your hand leaves the beam for just a millisecond, the water shuts off, then you wave your soap covered hands around feeling like a bigger idiot.

Infrared is way too niche and 1 settings only.

crazygringo2• 14 years ago

OK, just so everyone doesn't think I'm an idiot who puts soap on his hands before the water...

I had already turned on the faucet, gotten my hands wet, soaped up, and then when rinsing, realized it had gotten too hot and wanted to change the temperature so I could rinse without burning my hands... Man, people below are treating this like a brain-teaser!! ;) haha..

chestnut-tree• 14 years ago

Good points in this article. Another aspect I dislike about many modern bathroom sinks is the position of the tap (faucet).

If the sink has a single mixer tap, it's usually placed in the centre of the basin to give a neat symmetrical look. However, if the bathroom sink is fairly small, the tap protrudes forward and you find you can't lower your head to splash your face without accidentally bumping your head against the tap.

I prefer mixer taps that sit to the side of the basin or even mixer taps where you can swivel the arm left or right.

bobcattr• 14 years ago

What font is that, it's great.

aditgupta• 14 years ago

proxima-nova-soft

wting• 14 years ago

Proxima Nova Soft.

In the future check out this extension as it allows you to hover over elements to quickly find the font: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/whatfont/jabopobgc...

pasbesoin• 14 years ago

If you have a flat sink, you need an aerator on the spigot. This doesn't solve everything, but it's a big improvement with respect to splashing.

cturner• 14 years ago

I had an slight-tilt shower floor in Laos. No problems with the way the water hit the surface, but there were some problems with the way that the water was draining to a point two feet away from where the drain was.

acconrad• 14 years ago

I would say the best practical reason to move over to a flat design is performance increases. It has been shown that CSS properties such as background-image gradients and border-radii are among the worst offenders for decreased front-end performance. With websites approaching 2MB in size it is no surprise to me that flatter design makes for smaller files (less CSS prefixes, less JS repainting) and less browser rendering. This was precisely why our company moved over to a flat design as we've increased the number of users rapidly over the past year.

mikec3k• 14 years ago

You're falling into the trap of thinking everything is HTML. This doesn't apply to native code. There's very little penalty for using rounded rects, drop shadows (which are part of most drawing primitives), and gradients.

cpr• 14 years ago

He misses the most obvious problem of all, which is that you can't clean easily in the corners of many sharp-edged flat sinks.

jamesmcn• 14 years ago

The parabolic sinks that started popping up all over Seattle around a decade ago are great. If I owned my own place, I'd rip out all the existing sinks and put in parabolic sinks.

michaelfeathers• 14 years ago

Doesn't it seem that the move to flat design from skeuomorphism is an exact parallel of the move to modernism from pre-modernism in architecture?

davidwparker• 14 years ago

I'm not sure about bathroom sinks, but my wife and I hate our non-flat kitchen sink. Sure, I understand that it's curved so that it drains water, but there is such thing as too much curve. In our sink, dishes that should be able to be set down properly often end up tipping over or sliding towards the drain. It's actually a big pain as dishes slide and get in the way. Our next sink will most definitely be a flat (flat-ish, perhaps with a very, very small incline).

ianstallings• 14 years ago

Flat sinks are for putting utensils in and that should be the end of it. Easy to store dishes, pots, and pans. Curved sinks? Not so much. But for the bathroom? An odd choice but to each his own.

brudgers• 14 years ago

The analogy doesn't hold water.

A flat sink is a flat sink because it is flat.

A flat design is a flat design because we call it "a flat design."

Skeuomorphism isn't realism - pixels are pixels not leather.

A gradient isn't a shadow.

The flat "add comment" button below does not cause me confusion.

Curving a surface doesn't necessarily make it handle liquid properly.

A poorly designed urinal will splatter if hung too low on the wall.

And speaking of urinals, rounded corners and drop shadows do not make the image of a button art, unless perhaps one hangs it on the wall.

Semiapies2• 14 years ago

Skeuomorphism isn't realism

People argue that "skeuomorphism" isn't the right term for slapping photo textures on everything. It might not be, but obviously "realism" is an even worse term. Leather, chrome, or paper background textures resemble nothing "real" about showing weather forecasts, emails, or search results.

(That isn't to say good design can't use photo textures, but even many of the better examples tend toward the overblown "realism" of CD-ROM software from twenty years ago.)

monochromatic• 14 years ago

The analogy isn't between "flat" and "flat." It's between "different and worse" and "different and worse."

mblake• 14 years ago

Ahh, posts like this are like magnets for front-page HN. Mm, maybe I'm just a bit jealous. I should buy a boat. Or start a blog of my own.

brandoncarl• 14 years ago

My wife and I have encountered these at many hotels over the past few years.

The reason is environmental: the sink is supposed to splash if you turn the water too high. It's intended to keep you from wasting water.

rijoja• 14 years ago

if the reason is to avoid unnecessary water consumption, wouldn't it be better to limit the rate of the water? Less water is used and nobody gets wet and annoyed.

tedunangst• 14 years ago

Low flow faucets make you look cheap.

captiva12• 14 years ago

The issue with flat / minimal design is the lack of contrast. I have had problems when gmail redesigned the interface early this year.

sippndipp• 14 years ago

If you respect form follows function you can apply fashion to form. Now Apples "realism" seem to look old. In few years it's maybe in again. That's how fashion works.

neya• 14 years ago

The author goes to conclude that Windows RT is an example of 'Flat Design' and doesn't even justify why.

FYI: In my opinion, the author's $5.99 EBook on design is the best example of 'Flat Design' (I bought one). He claims to teach you to design a web app from scratch, but whereas the book is more of a walkthrough for a basic app than a 'how-to' (which is what he claims). Once you purchase his book, you realize it was a 'flat-design' and not a curvy one.

The author is an Apple fanboy himself, bashing out the new Windows Metro UI under the guise of a design article. Two years from now, I'd love to meet the author and see him claim the same thing. The author has a blind-folded belief that 'Apple knows what they're doing' or rather the 'Apple can do no wrong' mindset. I guess that's why you never saw any articles on Apple maps on his blog.

Coming back to the point, if Apple knows what they're doing, I bet Microsoft knows much better, because they are #2 in the OS arena WORLDWIDE (google for stats). So, this ideology that the Metro UI sucks is just time-limited. It's only a matter of time that people get accustomed to it and they will and MS knows that.

sgdesign6• 14 years ago

Wow. It's so interesting to see how our own biases can completely transform the meaning of what we're reading.

Where did I bash Windows RT? How am I an Apple fanboy when this article barely mentions Apple, and only to say designers are getting tired of Apple's aesthetic?

I'm a little bit sad for you. It seems you see all discourse through an "Apple vs XYZ" filter, and that must be extremely restrictive. Just think of all the information you're missing out on by reducing every single piece of information you come across to a binary dichotomy…

cwilson• 14 years ago

Solution: Lower the water pressure.

b0rsuk• 14 years ago

The disadvantages of flat sinks don't end there. They're harder to clean, because dirt tends to stick in the corners.

The Flat Sink

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