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.
Not every change is based on stylistic fads alone. Rounded corners on elements can increase the ability of users to recognize them and separate them from other elements, because visually the borders are less likely to be confused with other UI elements (lower cognitive load).
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
And they still managed to get the round corners wrong, apparently. According to that page, the radius values are hardcoded in pixels, so they don't scale with the display's DPI setting.
That's at least a decade after the W3C had a well-developed concept of relative units for use with the CSS:
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.
They use "effective pixels", just like CSS pixels are not actual pixels:
> 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.)
I just updated to Android 12 and the new border-radius on nearly every UI element is beyond absurd. It actually looks like someone just discovered that CSS property, and instead of being told by a designer "that looks goofy and childlike, tone it down," they doubled the value and put it on even more elements.
My notifications pull-down fits about 3 useful notifications. The rest is whitespace and rounded corners 4 layers deep. It's horrible.
Pill-shaped buttons were part of the Aqua theme in the original release of OS X. For a long time after that, UIs aped Aqua with pinstripes and jelly-shaded pills and while the pinstripes and jelly have gone, I think the pills are here to stay for some styles.
Yeah but there was a huge push just last year, basically every single SaaS app to Firefox, everyone folded. During the Aqua days, every company had their own unique take on design. Today, it is a design monoculture driven by the types of Stripe and Apple.
Design used to be a differentiating feature. Everything looks the same today. Kind of a Big Tech dystopia, even in design.
> 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.
I recently learned this specific combo is called “bisexual lighting”:
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Upon rewatch, im not even convinced its bullet time and not just a bunch of people standing very still. Which worked for the most part in Anna Karenina and that one video of kids playing basketball.
Your point makes sense though, the commonization of frame interpolation is a landmark moment.
I don't think this is a fad. Artists have been purposefully using limited palettes or limited gamuts for a long time. Often, painting the color that you actually see ends up looking garish, amateurish, or at best, out of place. The film industry is just doing what traditional representative Western Art has been doing for hundreds of years; even after artists had access to cheap, vibrant colors.
It's also way easier to have "good colors" (in a color theoretical sense) this way, and achieve a coherent and consistent look throughout the movie.
It's thus one of the best ways to keep budget down, as it will hide a lot of issues you'd have while filming, while generally requiring less work.
I believe it to be an important factor since full 3D movies have excellent color comps --see for instance Nathan Fowkes' works.
(as an side, in the opposite direction, I remember Kung-fu Panda having pretty good colours, yet I found it a bit tiring to watch.)
probably not another fad, it jus stems from color theory, which have been incorporated in film one way or another for a really long time. Even before these digital color grading took place, scenes in movies are carefully planned out, from set to costumes to lighting, so they fit within a certain range in the color space such it's pleasant for viewers.
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.
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.