From the World of Design Trends: “Flat Design” Is Dying

This was a pointlessly fluffy article that can be summed up with: "Flat design is a fad. Just like modern and postmodern movements have come and gone in art — so will this."

Well, of course movements change, so you could write an article as soon as a trend starts that its "dying."

More importantly, human-computer interactions is a relatively new area of design. How do we know that flat design will actually be just a fad rather than a paradigm shift?

Good riddance.

While flat design was definitely done "right" by some (e.g. Windows Phone) it was done very wrong indeed by others (iOS 7, Google Maps, Windows 8, et al). So wrong in fact that I'd go as far as to call it a usability anti-pattern.

There's a reason why shadows and borders exist: To distinguish items from one another on a 2D display. Without those clues it is hard to distinguish a text label from a clickable button.

Perfect example:

https://i.imgur.com/Auyj1Xs.jpg

So if you had never used Windows 8 before, you might not know that "Change PC Settings" is a button instead of the title of the section, and in my experience that is typical for most users.

Flat isn't dying, although maybe the most extreme version of it may be falling out of favor. Thick glassy, 3d icons with heavy drop shadows, skeuomorphism, and gradient bevels, protruding interface elements and the like are still as garish now as they were a year ago. The trend toward more subtle depth if any depth at all and only when needed is still very much a thing.

Much of the new popular UI designs is still pretty flat too: https://dribbble.com/

Site currently down. Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Xff7vYO...

And I just redesigned my websites from gradients to flat. What will they think of next?