Why is the design so messed up?

When you look at NextCloud, there are so many excesses that make working with NextCloud difficult. Why is that?

Here some examples.

NextCloud has started to make everything there is round. This wastes space pointlessly because the curves need more space.


It’s not the end of the world, but in my opinion it’s simply unnecessary.

If you do that, why do all the elements have a different radius?

You can see the same thing with the text fields, which again have a small radius:

It’s similar with the buttons. Sometimes there are icons in front of the text, but sometimes not. So far ok, but why is there more distance from the text for some than for others?
image

image

And in this screenshots you can see the different colors. Icons are white, texts are blue. In the follow screenshot you can see a grey icon… WHY?
image

I also find it strange that the text fields don’t have a background color, just a thick border, even though the buttons are all given some color (blue, green, gray…).
Why don’t the text fields also have the same background color so that everything is consistent?

And then the different spaces betweeninput fields. On the same site you can see this:

Everything seems thrown together somehow.
Is there a plan as to how this could be set up properly without each page having different formatting?

I could post a few more examples but I think the problem is understood through this.

Who decides which design is implemented and how?
Can I post and optimize the design in GitHub as described above as a pull request or what is the purpose of the takeover?
I have already published a few pull requests that have not been accepted to date.

By the way, this is supposed to be constructive criticism and not hate! :slight_smile:

Thank you!

The rounded corners with different radiuses are intentional and do follow a certain design language, however I can’t explain it to you, since I’m not a designer. But take a look at the Google web apps, where buttons also have different radiuses than input fields for example.

Other things like inconsistend colours can of course be bugs, so you can report them. There are also some 3rd party apps that sometimes do not fit in properly, for which you can open issues in the respective repos.

Maybe this is of any help: Design - Nextcloud

I think it will be difficult to get pull requests with fundamental design changes accepted, because if they would, the “mess” would probably end up bigger rather than smaller :wink:

Then maybe you should think again about the title of your post, and how the people who worked on the design of Nextcloud must feel when they read it.

2 Likes

The design people of Nextcloud have an open public room at

https://cloud.nextcloud.com/call/gqff69i8

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with them.

2 Likes