How Facebook will kill the gradient
A status-update signal fire for design trends
If you haven’t made a status update to Facebook recently — because, you know, that’s not really a thing that people do anymore — you might not have noticed a new feature to Facebook statuses, which was rolled out a few months ago.
It looks like this:
Instead of the usual text update, users have the option to create an image with text overlay, with color options and a trendy white sans-serif font.
Not a fan of the pink-to-purple option? Don’t worry, there’s more:
Gradients aren’t a new design trend.
In fact, websites like Smashing Magazine and Web Design Ledger have been writing about how they’re ‘making a comeback’ for almost a decade.
As someone who runs a design publication and works at a company focused on web design, I see a lot of gradients in my day-to-day life. We use them all the time on our own sites. It’s a quick, easy way to add some brightness and depth to an otherwise flat image or plain text.
But lately, it seems like gradients aren’t the trend: they’re the default. And as a result, the internet looks like this:
Everyone online is desperate to catch your attention: with bright colors, pop-up ads, and UX traps — and some say that it’s leading to a worse-looking internet.
According to TechCrunch, Facebook’s reasoning for this update is to create an opportunity for more attention-grabbing, visual status: “colored backgrounds make sure a spontaneous exclamation or a bit of poetry won’t get lost in the increasingly flashy feed.”
Increasingly. Flashy.
Maybe, like me, you didn’t see the update, but did notice a weird amount of text-gradient-overlay images on the Facebook, and assumed it was some new app that teenagers were using — the ‘take a screenshot of a note on my phone,’ version 2.0.
But maybe, as a result, it made you like gradients a little less.
So, gradients aren’t cool anymore. What can I use instead?
Not to fear! There are, literally, thousands of other background patterns and styles to use. Here’s a few to add to your arsenal:
