This design looks so cheap to me, it’s just a bunch of random covers, there is no information about the movies presented in any way, the covers are way too big and take up an inordinate amount of space and there is nothing breaking up sections, design is just so fucking dumb now, fuck mobile
rant over 😅
It’s the Windows 8 Metro UI.
Metro UI included titles (inside the tile), so it very much isn’t. It may be inspired, but it’s like “let’s take elements of the design and make it worse”
you can clearly tell the movie vibe from the cover design. you click on it, and can read the summary, or watch the trailer. move on with your life.
Social media told me gradeschoolers can’t read now. I guess they don’t want all those nonsense symbols everywhere.
Same design Steam etc use for their video game stores and libraries. Yeah. :<
Web/UI design in general has sucked for at least 14 years now. Everything is spaced too far apart and text/images are too big. Icons are used for critical functionality instead of words. Pointless animations and gradients slow everything down for no reason.
Mobile first! MoBiLE FiRsT!!!
What that?
AI?
AI FiRst!!
I guess this should incentivize me to click them?
Well, it doesn’t. It’s just noise i ignore, because there’s too much of it in the net anyway.
My local movie theater in the heart of downtown has taken down all the movie posters outside the entrance and replaced them with a single screen that only shows ads for overpriced popcorn “deals”.
Before, anyone walking by knew which movies were currently playing; now, all they know is just how outrageously expensive the popcorn is.
I haven’t been to that theater since.
You should tell them.
Yeah, I guess I should. I just can’t quite understand how anyone could fail to realize how absurd it is for a movie theater to use its most prominent advertising space not for promoting its movie lineup, but for food offerings.
To me, this strongly suggests that this movie theater—which is part of a large chain—now sees its main product as food rather than movies.
I have absolutely no sympathy for that, and I can only applaud it when a company like that loses customers because of its own idiocy.
Food probably actually is their main product. Granted it’s been a very long time since I worked in a movie theatre but when I did they told us that of $14 or so of ticket price they only made about 50c and that candy bar sales were actually their real business.
Yes, that’s true, of course, but you’re not going to sell much if you don’t promote the lineup that actually draws in the customers, would you?
I mean, before, all you had to do was walk past the movie theater to find out what was playing. Like many others, I walk past it very often, and I’ve often spotted a movie that interested me and then come back a few days later to watch it.
Now I have to actively check their website to find out what movies are currently playing, which I don’t do very often.
The theater operators must be fully aware of this—as well as of the fact that the food options they’re now exclusively promoting are so expensive that they’re more likely to deter potential visitors than attract them.
It’s as if an attractive tourist destination were to advertise overpriced tourist-trap restaurants instead of the sights that make the destination appealing in the first place—and that would at least make the inflated prices somewhat understandable.
That should be obvious to any marketer or, for that matter, the management in charge. Customers, of course, aren’t interested in which products yield the highest profit margin for the company, but rather in what they get for their money—after all, no one goes to the movies for the popcorn, but for the films themselves. I’d say anyone who doesn’t understand that is completely out of place in this business. The experience has to be the movie; everything else is just an afterthought.
I’m finding myself having to guide people through UIs that have random symbols instead of an obvious word that says what it does.
It’s annoying and getting worse.
You can easily use a word button to point to a side out menu with words, all language localised, that will actually make sense to a user instead of causing a tech anxiety attack!
I shouldn’t have to scout and translate a UI for someone. If there’s one bright side to all the AI being pushed at users is that it’s at least able to communicate with actual text, and usually wants to be user-friendly instead of hostile.
The future begins to look more and more like idiocracy everyday.
It’s part of the infuriating trend on removing all words from UIs. God forbid the kids learn how to read a movie title. Using modern apps means navigating a never ending stream of hieroglyphs. The “save”, “load”, “new”, “share” buttons are long gone; replaced with an ever changing series of symbols.
Unpopular opinion: I want as little information as possible before watching a movie. At the other end of the spectrum, we have trailers which basically spoil the whole film. The only information I want about a movie is whether it’s interesting, which I will get from audience sentiment online, and the only information I really need is the title.
Any additional information is either irrelevant to the movie experience, or a spoiler. Yeah I’m a weird little freak, and I like low-information posters. It’s better than posters which give away too much
“Don’t tell me anything about it.”
searches the Metacritic score
Yeah ok, but at least give me a name. For example, the suggestions of GOG doing the same, some don’t have a name in the logo pic.
I’m so here for this.
It’s genuinely infuriating to see a hundred years of movie poster art evolution discarded. It’s the first part of a movie’s artistic statement you ever see, and it gets summarily tossed in the trash so that Netflix’s internal overworked engagement metrics team can spend 2 minutes grabbing random shots of different stars in the film, slap single-color generic font text all over it, and target twelve versions to different demographics to try to get more clicks.
It’s even worse when I tell this to someone and they’re like, “I don’t really notice.”
Oh my goodness thank you I finally feel vindicated like no one around me ever mentions anything about it, I do need some more friends lol, but yeah as someone who does design and appreciates good design and knows what a hell creatives put ourselves through to go through the process of making something people love and then it all gets reduced to garbage like this
This isn’t the first time the aesthetic trend of film posters changed but I‘m sure every time it happened there was someone being grumpy about it.
You know what?! I was!!
Dreamworks knows what they did, homogenizing every single cover.
UI’s for movie streaming services are not designed to help you find something to watch. They are designed to keep you “engaged”, which means in the platform and not realizing that the pool of actually interesting things is about as deep as a puddle. Everything about streaming sites’ design is user hostile and this is a classic example of that.
Isn’t Jellyfin the same design as all the streaming platform and they have nothing to gain for keeping you engaged?
Almost, but it has movie titles under the poster/cover and usually pulls the actual movie covers.
Once you click into it, it gives a shitton of detail about the movie.
Once you click into it, it gives a shitton of detail about the movie.
Is this not the case with netflix/hbo? Sorry i never actually used any streaming service before other than Jellyfin so i don’t understand what is the issue here
Two things off the top of my head:
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Jellyfin displays ratings from RT (and opencritic maybe?), while Netflix has stopped displaying their own user ratings years ago.
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Jellyfin displays the full cast and crew. When you click an actor, director,… it shows you other media where they appear, even individual episodes. Netflix has none of that.
Ohh, okay, that’s actually horrible.
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Jellyfin has like six different view types to pick from, including one that doesn’t even show images. And almost all the others show the title always visible below the preview image.
Yeah but they don’t have highly paid UX design teams, so they’re probably just copying design choices on the basis that they’re trying to offer people a similar experience they can own.
Also, it’s FOSS so you can always make your own skin/theme.
Jellyfin a) only has the content you feed it, so you already have some knowledge about it and b) you can expand it with plugins and make the design however you like it.
Everything others said, plus you can choose your client. For example, I use VoidTV for Jellyfin on my TV which offers a different design (though I use it because it’s the only Jellyfin client where DD video+audio work).
Yeah I suppose, you just gotta pick one thing and then it does the rest, or that’s what they want probs
I need to search movies and stuff like a database, not algorithmically from the covers in a database. I need more detail than that.
We were discussing how nice it was in the good old days to go into a rental shop and just look for movies based on the covers. Sure this design doesn’t really hit that itch but more information is not always better.
It’d be nice to just have a bunch of movies that are just random within their main category. No algorithms or marketing.
You can watch any movie you want as long as it’s Mortal Kombat.
