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Comment by ericb | Hacker News Reader

Flat design is the wood-paneled car of the design world. Design goes through trends. In 10 years, I don't know what websites will look like, but I doubt flat will be it.

Flat design is bad because it gives up visual cues that convey information in return for conformance to a monotonous style. Sure, it is simple to design in, but trading off visual cues is user-unfriendly, and the future is in more user-friendliness. Style does matter. Flat sites offer a limited design space to explore before they seem repetitive.

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"Flat design is bad because it gives up visual cues that convey information in return for conformance to a monotonous style."

So make a flat design that doesn't give up these visual cues? All these complaints are just farts in the wind, and I only single your post out because it was pithy. Not only is the term "flat design" horrendously vague and difficult to pin down, but the very idea that there is some kind of absolute scale by which to judge design–clearly implicit in your judgement–should raise a few eyebrows.

Ultimately what matters is communicating to the user how to interact with the product in question. Everything else is marketing and will be subject to trends. But you could make a delightful and useful skeuomorphic interface or a delightful and useful flat interface or any one of a million variations on those spectrums and many others.

The cues are a result of depth. You have given them up, by-definition when you use a flat design.

edit: To enumerate some of the affordances you lose and problems:

-What is a button? What can I interact with? A raised button used to be a good cue.

-Is that toggle on or off (depressed or no)?

-What is clickable?

-What is important? Closer things used to be more important.

-Is this a "thing" or a word? Shadows used to hint at this.

-Is this a banner or a button?

-What did I click? I don't even know!

Non-flat designs work because they use real world metaphors to build a natural vocabularly that is almost universally understood by our common experiences living in a 3D world. Now, perhaps you can re-define this naturally shared design vocabulary in the flat world. But the point is, you are redefining something which people intuitively already know, and when you have to teach users your interface, that is never as friendly as when they know how to use it intuitively.

What about hyperlinks? Menus? OS X dock icons? Terminals? Folder icons? Highlighted text?

I don't think the affordance of raised buttons is really such a crucial issue.

I agree with hyperlinks and probably menus & the terminal (unless you consider it a representation of the old school console terminal PCs of the 70s and 80s) having no real life equivalent. However, folder icons would be symbolic of a real world example though. Even a dock is sort of a facsimile of having things laid out in front of you on an actual desk.

The OS X deck is 3D since Leopard, but it used to just be a rectangular array of clickable pictures. With little triangles under the "open" ones.

Humans adapt. People who grew up with console terminal interfaces find them more usable than point-and-click interfaces. The assumption that common people will be all confused and miserable if you take away the bevels from buttons seems kind of unimaginative.

HackerNews is pretty flat and still usable to me.

"The cues are a result of depth. You have given them up, by-definition when you use a flat design."

Except that flat designs aren't defined as eliminating depth cues. The simply do not rely on them so much or demand additional cues. The Flat Design Church does tolerate depth, and many "flat designs"include some notion of planar layout. It's just that depth cues aren't supposed to be primary cues in a flat design.

And for good reason. Depth cues are often very subtle and increasingly UX needs to be good even when looking at a dim screen under bright sunlight. The advent of mobile is demanding designers start going high contrast, and so flat design is an obvious choice. It is, ultimately, a phase. People have reverted to the simplest solutions for more visually rugged UIs, but we're starting to see a new and more nuanced set of visual grammars emerge.

Not sure I agree with your analogy, though I agree with the gist.

I'd say flat design is like Ikea furniture - functional, sparse, nothing ornate, relying on basic colors and shape for differentiation. Very mix-and-match.

I agree with the author - flat design is like having a good UI framework that's widely used (say Microsoft's WFC in the 90's and iOS in late '00s) - low barrier to entry, and the differentiators can be applied once a core success is won. The platform will re-invent, or a new platform will show up, and your UI will look stale after a while, but you do get a couple of years to worry about functionality first.

In thinking about it--my analogy could be better chosen, especially since skeuomorphism (which many, hold is the opposite of flat design) is embodied in wood-paneling. The idea was that totally flat things will look dated at some point. My point was that it will look "dated" but that irony is not lost on me.

I don't personally think Skeuomorphism is the opposite of flat design, I think of it more as "realism" as the opposite pole. Skeuomorphsim is less about perspective and distance and more about textural materials or design artifacts.

I'll take flat design over liquid buttons and shoddy, poorly thought-out skeuomorphism any day. You may hate it, but it's going to be ubiquitous for a while.

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