It Is Not Flat Design. It's Just Proper Design

This deck is interesting and mostly a good way to look at many information presentation situations, but it is another instance of the recurring theme of annoying absolute statements from self-important designers.

There is bad design, there is good design, there is no "proper" design, and any designer who claims so needs to check their ego at the door before you hire them. Design and style evolve, and much of it involves fashion, fad, style, and preference. These elements evolve over time, vary between situations, companies, and products, and are part of the character of the statement design makes.

This presentation would be considered boring in some situations, depressing at others, ultrachic in others.

Not everyone wants to sit on purple glowing cubes with a fernet milkshake under mood lighting in tight pants. Some people enjoy sitting on saddles, twirling their mustaches, and line-dancing the cowshit off their boots.

Flat design is just design. It's a type of design like anything else; there's nothing "proper" about it. It's not "proper" when people screw it up because they don't include sufficient visual interface cues which result in a drastic drop in usability (I'm looking at you, Microsoft). It's just design. People can execute it horribly, and other people, like, say, Google, can execute it remarkably well.

What I find is that design is far too polarizing. There's no middle ground between skeuomorphic, three-dimensional, and flat interfaces. Why can't we have something like OS X 10.6, where there were elements of all design trends, and the result was a clean and very usable interface? Why did they have to fuck it up with 10.7 and the awful skeuomorphism? Why can't we have drop shadows? What is so "unproper" about them? Why can't we have gradients? Is it "unproper" to have those too?

This conversation has gone on long enough, and I'm tired of it. Flat design is just design.

End of story.

More amusingly, this very presentation has a (subtle) background gradient, text shadow, a gratuitous fading animation between different background colors for different sections, and a 3D flip animation when you hover over a link, none of which are exactly hallmarks of "flat design".

I'm not unsympathetic to everything in his presentation, but the broadside of self-importance coupled with the bad design decisions in the document is pretty lame.

What the content is describing is good design, particularly:

- The more variations in embellishment contrast you employ, the weaker the content becomes and more complex the document becomes.

- Embellishing content... to enhance context, to enhance contrast, to enhance clarity

However, the criticisms of "flat design" generally run along the lines of not providing enough affordance (is that a label or a button?) and not providing enough contrast/clarity (making all the elements on the page look the same, leading to confusion and lack of hierarchy, instead of sufficiently differentiating them through the use of color, depth, shadows, etc.).

The author then says that "visual interest" is an appropriate thing, but then says to use flat iPhone/iPad outlines, instead of photorealistic ones. Well, generally the photorealistic outline is going to look nicer, as long as your page isn't already too busy. It's a poorly chosen example.

The author is trying to define away "flat design" as "good design", but that simply isn't the case. Flat design is a very specific design trend that is not the same as good design -- it can be used well, or used badly. Good design is good design period, and flat design can sometimes be very bad design.

On the left, I see two luggage tags. On the right, an iPhone and an iPad.

Making your audience guess what your "deconstructed" visuals are actually supposed to be is not good -- it's mystery meat design.

Speaking of meat, don't get me started on the hamburger icon.

That is like saying if a product can't sell itself without marketing, then it is a bad product. Such a claim assumes there is some universal definition of 'bad' and that if embellishment is needed to bring attention to an element, that its content must be bad.

If you are going to make the above claim, you might as well make a case for living in a black and white world where the colors and design are mostly used to embellish otherwise bad things.

Does his substantial beard take away, or add to his persona?

I wonder how he would fare if he were given the chance to design the website for the next Halo game.

Seems the simplest way to convey the information would've been graphically.

I guess so we don't mistake it for, say, fashion design?

Anyway, it'd be interesting to find out just how far back illustrations for text goes. Who was the first guy to propose adding "illumination" to manuscripts? And then how did that begin a pile-on to the point where the "illumination" was crass ornamentation to impress the higher-ups instead of being actually functional?

I doubt that we need to intellectualize this much. Otto Neurath and the Logical Positivists pretty much planned this. Design is now in the age of Visual Statistics: http://www.gerdarntz.org/content/gerd-arntz -- or from another perspective, "Content is King."

Flickr and Kippt are now the Same Thing: http://imgur.com/iar7Bgn,t8cnZA3,2lXFz4a

Even that URL has their design suggested in its syntax. Imgur too. Kippt arguably has better engineering talent.

*That's an important asterisk! More on this in a moment.

Quality content. Or "good content" like the author calls it.