I'm with you on this. iOS did go too far with all the skeumorphism that served no purpose (Podcast app being the biggest offender), but "flat design" throws the baby out with the bathwater in my opinion.

I'm already tired of guessing what is and isn't a button.

If only there was an operating system that would let you to choose from different themes for the desktop environment. /s

If only people realised that design is more than a theme.

If only people realise that Flat UI is more performant in mobile

It isn't performing for me in mobile. I am pushing a rectangle and nothing is happening.

Idea: someone should create a slightly snarky design site that tells you all the fonts, styles, and colors you should be using now to look 'modern'.

Bonus points if you mention the last time a particular trend surfaced.

"It looks like UI design is becoming like fashion;"

How could it possibly be anything else?

It could, and should, be a science. Or at least pragmatic.

If you look at clothing design, the fashion side is mostly outlandish and completely impractical. Eventually good ideas filter out of that and get into everyday clothing manufacturing, which is what everyone can actually wear.

The problem with UI design is that UIs need to be used every day, like ordinary clothing, but its becoming like clothing fashion: changing too often and usually full of flashy but unusable cruft. This would be ok if it was limited to a small number of fashionable websites, but instead everyone (but most developers) want the flashy.

High fashion is mostly outlandish and completely impractical, because it is about concepts and abstract ideas more than about wearability. High-end fashion (not high fashion) on the other hand distils the concepts into wearable products that the every-day brands emulate.

The gap from high-end fashion to everyday brands is not so big - take a look at e.g. GQ and look around you to see what people actually wear, and you will quickly start seeing the same patterns and cuts and colours a few months offset (because the fashion magazines tends to report on the upcoming season), just in cheaper imitations - for the most part. And you'll see them spreading as they filter down the cost ladder.

And by the time "everyone" is wearing the cheap imitations, you'll see people in the designer brands wearing different styles and the cycle starts again.

It's the same with UI's: There's a continuous cycle of trying to look modern, refined and exclusive, and so it needs to be regularly reinvented, or it will look old-fashioned, drab and cheap.

It's not about wanting "flashy" (mostly; there are certainly sub-cultures that value flashy above following mainstream fashion). It's about wanting "modern" and "high value".

Fashion is a science, or at least it is governed by human behavior in their sense of time. "Freshness" provides a feeling of improvement over time, while "staleness", though more familiar and comfortable, provides a sense stagnation, that time is frozen. It is really no wonder why young people are interested in being "fashionable" (they want time to progress, they want change) while old people are often not so interested in it (they already have a lifetime of change to reflect on).

For many websites, sure, it is superfluous, but the psychological effects are massive; ignore it at your own peril.

It's pretty much the same with applications and websites. The "trendy" ones seem to have fancy interfaces that are useless (I'm thinking of this trend in web page design to have vertically scrolling pages where each page is a different color background and has about 3 words of actual content on).

Real applications pretty much ignore all that and look like they always have

I think that modern ui design is being approached more like package (graphic) design. That is: when your product is displaying on shelves with ten similar products you need to make it flashier and more colorful, yet similar to everything else in the same category. All cereal package design looks similar, yet, everyone tries to outflash everyone else.

For some reason, we designers are still designing with this mentality.

It could, you know, be useful. It could be developed according to the principle "form follows function", not the other way round.

Form follows function is incredibly undetermined. Multiple divergent designs can execute/allow the same functionality to the same degree.

This is especially true in software. Some additional constraints must be put on to narrow down on a single design. Maybe the constraint is developer familiarity, or developer laziness, or fashion, or whatever.

While there can clearly be 'too much' fashion, its not quite a given that current trends lie in that area, any more than previous trends have.

There are lots of books on evidence-driven UI design.

It depends whether you mean fashion in design principles driven by evidence or visual fashions like in clothing. I think both are inevitable to some degree.

This has been the case for the web since day 1. I can remember all sorts of trends that everyone followed, some of them examples of terrible UI. Anybody remember the super-tiny and/or monospace text phenomenon of the early 00s?

Yep... used to design anime sites with that all the time, font was 04b03. Size 10 with 2 pix border (black text, white border!)

It's because flat UI looks good on retina / 5k.

I don't necessarily agree with this. I think the reason why flat UI is having a moment is the same reason minimalism in general works. You get to remove anything things that are superfluous and focus on data/information. As awesome as spinning 3D globes and background rivets are, I prefer flat design when it comes to getting information.

I think it's best to try to get rid of unnecessary garbage in your UI, maybe that's the skeuomorphism, or maybe it's the amount buttons, images, content, etc. If done well, flat design is a usability win.

> It's because flat UI looks good on retina / 5k.

I can't tell if you're being serious. But if you are, could you explain why?

Otherwise, this is one of many reasons I don't like flat design. It doesn't take advantage of all those pixels. It's just a flat wash of color.

A few reasons. Things like gradients and other skeuomorphic components that are usually jpegs look horrible if you don't have fallbacks for retina. The screen is brighter and crisper, so those vector buttons look great. etc.

My girlfriend has, I think, an android 2.3 phone. Flat designs are HORRIBLE on it. However, they look crisp on a retina phone, so much that it actually look like the screen is made of physical (material) components.

As for people liking it or not? That's just a trend. We are going back to skeuomorphism in a few years, mark my word.

It doesn't "look good" because some weird combination of large screen and flatUI, rather its easy to render on the screen because it has the same flat color in large areas than some sort of shading.

Not really, Apple introduced transparent/translucent windows, it doesn't really simplify the rendering. BTW, Microsoft already made this mistake with Vista, and AFAIK regrets it (also, Windows look terrible on Remote Desktop because of that).

Yeah, because we've all had 5K displays for, like, for-EVER now...

This is nothing new. As long as there have been GUIs, platforms have issued style guides to developers and expected them to emulate the look-and-feel of the platform's own OS and flagship apps. Remember "lickable" OSX?

Flat itself is a design fad like any other, and the reality is the app's appearance and adherence to trends is a real signal of quality to most users.

> As long as there have been GUIs, platforms have issued style guides to developers and expected them to emulate the look-and-feel of the platform's own OS and flagship apps.

There's a difference between having a platform-specific GUI/style-guide (which I support), and changing it every few years for no apparent reason (I understand e.g. the change from Apple OS 9 to OS X - they were simply catching up with the hardware improvements - but OS X to OS Y(osemite) seems quite arbitrary).

> UI design is becoming like fashion

I think it's always been fashionable to have a modern UI. Just look at windows (the concept). I think the trends are just moving faster nowadays, as the tools to related to developing UIs become more accessible.

With the new higher dpi displays, they now follow modern print design conventions instead of some pseudo 3d look, which does not look all that good when viewed at high resolution.

It's because skeuomorphism worked when you had screens of a consistent size. Ie, iPhone 4s and below. Because skeuomorphism is so bitmap heavy it doesn't scale to different screen sizes.

Imo flat design came largely from responsive web design. It's just easier to build nice looking ui which adapts to any screen size when it's flat. This of course was why it suited android, because they have hundreds of diff screen sizes to cater for...

I have to agree - I predict that in 3 years, metro will look very dated and design will be focusing on actual information density and nice effects again. It's just sad we have to sit through this wave of crap before that happens.

I don't know, I think a lot of the design trends right now are being driven by touch interfaces. When the mode of interaction is the ridiculously inaccurate finger, you HAVE to have giant swathes of empty space, otherwise nobody is able to actually hit what they want.

Exactly. Soon enough, people will stop trying to force the same UI on every device, and mouse interfaces will get better again.

Agreed. Design seems to go through phases.

http://gbatemp.net/attachments/windows8-fail-jpg.2755/

Honestly I too felt that current OSx redesign is pointless though I like Google material design...kind of strange taste I have.

Yet the terminal never changes :)

I think it comes from trying to make screens appear like paper prints - some people love the feel of reading books/magazines and skeumorphic design elements feel disturbing to them.