Just when I thought we might be starting to pivot away from flat design - does anyone know of a different design paradigm that is being used by smaller/fringe designers who are tired of flat/minimal UX/UI?
Unfortunately, most design programs don't actually teach these foundational skills. That means there are a lot of designers out there who are forced to work in an oversimplified print-design style to hide their incompetence.
As someone who hires for this stuff, finding skilled designers is unimaginably hard.
I hear designers constantly complaining about the lack of jobs. They're full of it. The problem is the lack of skilled applicants. Design has become filled with lazy people, while being arguably one of the hardest fields to be good at. I've had ads out in a major US city for months for a very good paying design job, and have yet to see a portfolio that looked even moderately professional.
That's really where this all comes from, flat design hides designer incompetence.
It's not a pay issue as best as I can tell.
If a skilled surgeon (or someone 5+ years into their career at Goldman, etc) makes 4 times the median of your city, what does the median have to do with what they're worth?
Sorry, not trying to be rude, but whenever I hear people saying they "can't find anyone", they still counter that they're offering enough...and yet they still can't fill the position. It doesn't make any sense.
So I don't think if I were a good graphic designer now, I'd be stoked on 70k a year in most locales.
richard [|)07] laborde [@7] gmale
I've always viewed success as passionate curiosity. If the mindset is there, but not the skill, you can teach the later.
Maybe change the job title and see what happens?
Agree strongly that good designers are very hard to come by - it takes years of experience combined with some level of innate talent to be a top level designer.
I'm so glad we're mostly rid of useless ornamentation: endless bevels, drop-shadows, gradients, and skeuomorphism...
There are many different takes on flat design, so it's not a design mono-culture. Google, Microsoft and Apple all have unique, flat, design languages.
Yes, they all use a different color scheme.
Flat animated is sort of where it is at now. Google's material would fall under flat animated as well as much of iOS 8/9, but drop shadows and gradients are better replaced with subtle tones and accenting along the lines of posterized Anime art [1].
As a designer if you can make Google and Apple's latest efforts look dated, you've done an excellent job. Flat 3d sort of does that.
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[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=flat+3d+ui&es_sm=93&source=l...
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=posterized+art&es_sm=93&sour...
I'm also interested in learning about some alternative designs though.
My experience is that it seems to be based on the philosophy of "just touch things to learn what they do" but then you're constantly punished with "oh, you touched something so things changed". It's a minefield.
It's not particularly the "flat" design that's at fault here, but it's lumped with this simultaneous trend of feature deletion and cryptoUI.
No right clicking, no long press, overflow style menus are meant to be used sparingly.