Flat design continues to be popular - but can easily backfire
if you don't use it properly, says Josh Kimnell of Collider.
Christopher Columbus may well have made it his life's
work to prove that the world was round, but in the world of design, flat
is where it's at. In the last few years we've seen a significant shift
in web design and app design away from rich and detailed, to minimal and flat design.
It's not necessarily that we as designers have fallen out of
love with rich design. I'd suggest that we've simply rediscovered a
more concise mode of visual communication in digital.
It's a design ethos that has been around for a long time but
has only been fit for digital application in recent years now that the
technology and the user base has matured.
Windows 8 heralded that flat design in digital had truly arrived
The answer to that question is evolution. One of the first
and most highly visible examples of flat design in digital was
Microsoft's Metro design language. The intention at the time was to
create an experience that was authentically digital and worked on big
screen and small, touchscreen or not.
Their opinion, and an opinion that has been widely adopted since, is that we are all used to using technology now.
We're used to interacting with computers whether they sit on
our desk or in our pocket and the obscuring surface that is the
interface was becoming unnecessarily convoluted and pointlessly
decorative for our highly evolved brains. We're now comfortable dealing
with abstract concepts and nuanced control mechanisms like hidden and
contextual menus.
Authentically digital
Flat design in web design is an extension of that
'authentically digital' ethos. We acknowledge that an online florist
doesn't actually have to look like a bricks and mortar florist on screen
for today's audience to understand it, but it also represents the way
in which technology shapes our design choices.
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The tools at hand - CSS3, HTML5, JavaScript and the growing importance of responsive web design
- mean that we tend towards creating highly performant, extensible
front-ends without the excess baggage of a highly embellished graphical
user interface.
There are, however, certain pitfalls to avoid when making the switch from lumpy to flat.
Dangers of flat design
Don't get accused, as Apple has been, of jumping on the bandwagon for its own sake
From an aesthetic standpoint there is the fear that you'll
look dated if you don't do the 'flat' design thing - and so you might be
itching to jump on the bandwagon. But as evidenced by the release of
iOS 7, there is the very real possibility of failure.
This initially patchy and inconsistent interface, together
with an awful mapping service, was widely seen as Apple playing catch-up
with Windows and Google and generally botching the task. For a company
with such a storied history of iconic design this was a big and
unexpected misstep.
If negotiated elegantly and executed with skill the switch
to 'flat' will leave you with something clean, powerful and effective -
such as these examples of flat design done right.
Unlike the trendy, transient and fickle stylistic choices of
Web 2.0, the glossy button and gradients look we all came to hate, flat
design - or at least the principals, which govern it - should stick
around for a good while yet. Words: Josh Kimnell
