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"Flat" Design popular?
Hi everyone! For a long time already we can see, that mostly all websites tend to use "minimalistic" style. White colours, free space, and "flat" design.
Just wondering, what do you think, is it still popular nowadays and when will this period be over? :D




It actually has transitioned BACK to a "flatter" look quite recently.
Beginning in 2001 with Apple's release of Mac OS X, the prevailing web design trend was the "aqua" "glassy/glossy bubble" look.
Everyone followed suit.
Apple prided itself on skeumorphism, and drove that trend into the ground, as it were. They needed a fresh start because they kept running into the limitations that style presents.
And, again, everyone followed suit.
The return to a flatter look allows for much more freedom in terms of UI design and UX efficiency.
Colors complicate things. Textures complicate things. Both create visual noise that is unnecessary in an interface most of the time.
The content should be king, in the opinion of many designers.
Nice reply! Thanks a lot. Interesting, what do others think?
To say "Apple did a thing, and everyone followed suit" is a bit reductionist. There are trends in design, like there are trends in anything else, and while we can say "THAT had a huge influence on the design trends of the time," there's never any one source.
For example, Microsoft unveiled their Metro design language with Windows Phone 7, in 2010, three years before Apple unveiled iOS 7, and you could see the design leading up to that in Microsoft's Zune, further back.
A year later, Google unveiled Material Design, which also contains a lot of the characteristics people associate with "flat" design. They'd quite likely been working on it a fair while before Apple's announcement.
All of these were reactions to the too-skeumorphic designs of eras past, and they were also following a lot of web design trends, which had been becoming more "minimalist" and "type-centered" since '08 or so.
The other thing is... Skeumorphism isn't really dead. To have skeumorphic elements simply means to make them reminiscent of things we see in the real world, as a shorthand for how to use them. 3D buttons pop out like real buttons because that's an easy way to signal you can press them. That doesn't mean obnoxious glass textures or anything. A subtle bevel is fine. The reason we don't bevel our buttons anymore is because that's a learned interface convention. Even without the bevel, we can recognize a button, so at that point, it becomes safe to get rid of it.
So even if our calendars don't have a papery texture to them, they're still layed out like our physical world calendars. Clocks faces are still circular. Hell, Material Design is called that because it uses subtle skeumorphism, with their whole "paper is the metaphor" thing, and centering everything around the idea of "layers."
Great points!
I just think it is a great trend for all of us "not-so-talented" designers! :) (And I hope it will last for a long time...)