Part of me wants to throw up my hands in the air and cry out "Why, God, why?" when I encounter yet another UI with flat design.

It is like a mass delusion or something that some segment of the population seems to think it that flat design is actually useful for the everyday user.

We've seen other stupid useless crap spread like a wave across our industry, across our society... so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Though I've started to question my own sanity.

Modern UI design is optimized for screenshots in a PowerPoint, and from there, to screenshots in a portfolio and on marketing pages where the audience that needs to be satisfied is marketing themselves, and especially people very concerned that every piece of everything be "on brand" and who are entirely sure this matters a ton for making sales.

That's what's going on, as far as I can tell.

I'd go as far as to say that these failings started in proprietary software, hyped, marketed and then copied by FLOSS.

First, I was addressing design in FOSS because:

a) there probably aren't many lead designers, creative directors and art directors on this developer-centric site b) interface choices for most commercial products are deliberately made by other people c) interface choices for most FOSS projects are made by developers

Second, I didn't directly address the criticism for the same reason I don't go into game forums and argue with the inevitable teen tech wizard lobbing glib, unsubstantiated technical criticism at the "stupid devs." Their peers might believe their saying that a "microservices architecture" caused low frame rates in the last release, but professional developers will roll their eyes hard enough to sprain an eyelid.

I won't waste my time with a point-by-point teardown, but if you're actually interested, here's the first half dozen unsubstantiated assumptions I've seen here about design/designers and the design process:

- 'Flat designs' are uniform enough to judge their value as a unit. - A bad flat design was bad because it was flat— not the hundreds of other problems a design can have. - Designers change things solely to suit their taste or follow trends - Designers don't commonly test or measure usability with quantifiable, auditable data - Bad usability is acceptable if it looks good. - How well you parse something is representative of how everybody else does regardless of their culture, age, experience with other objects, experience with computers, vision, disabilities, etc. - Skeuomorphism was the most effective form to convey those visual cues.

aaaand the list goes on. It's fine that many developers don't totally understand how design works because nobody expects you to be a subject matter expert in anything other than development. That said, confidently making sweeping judgements about design and designers when you don't understand some important fundamentals is just bad form.

A very glib response. I can go on and on. But i wont.

Thanks for your valuable and well-reasoned contribution to the thread, spacexsucks.