Flat design isn’t the best. It’s just the best we have
I’ve noticed a significant number of articles on Medium about flat design.
Its the overwhelmingly popular aesthetic for app icons and interfaces. Its everywhere you would usually go on the internet. ‘Many people define it as more of an ethos than an aesthetic even.
There doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to stick with flat design other than the fact that everyone is doing it, though.
I agree with Damien Madray that flat design is nothing more than a step forward in design history. Design is a series of tests and hypotheses. We‘re currently living through a large-scale test of how flat design actually works.
It’s difficult to challenge the appearance of other popular apps and expect consumers to get on board with your product. Flat design is great for the time being while our lives revolve around our flat phone screens.
This will all change, however, with the oncoming wave of new technologies.
AR and VR are going to redefine the field of UX/UI design, however. There’s no reason to be stuck designing flat in a 3D space. Skeumorphism was a cool design movement, and I think it will be applied widely in these emerging fields.
Particularly with AR, objects with a sense of belonging in the physical space will be easier for users to navigate.
Or perhaps UX design in these emerging fields will go the same way that design did for phone screens. Originally apps were designed primarily to imitate their physical analogues. Once we were used to smart phones, though, designers started to abstract their forms, eventually doing away with imitations of the physical world.
AR/VR might start off bound to skeumorphism and then translate into yet unexplored territories of interactive design. We won’t know what’s best for these technologies until far down the line when we’ve all ditched our smart phones for fancy new headsets though.
UX design is already changing to adapt to these new technologies. There is a variety of web resources available now for designers to consider while moving forward with new projects.
It’s an exciting time for technology and I can’t think of a more interesting place to be than in a VR company’s design department.
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