Hacker News Reader

Comment by unfletch | Hacker News Reader

    "...sidenote, what's the correct terminology for the opposite
     of 'flat design'? It's certainly not skeumorphic..."

Well, we're talking about GUI design, and beveled buttons/menus etc. have pretty much been the norm for the GUI's entire history. So how about just using "traditional"?

View on HN

The trend towards a beveled 3D look in GUIs only really started after NeXT started showing NEXTSTEP in 1988. It was a big differentiator for the NeXT interface; it made people sit up and take notice.

Before then by and large GUIs had a flat look. The only depth was a bit of "cartoonish" drop-shadow on windows and menus on the Lisa and Mac (much more subtle - 1px - on the Mac) and on the minimize/maximize/close button contents on Windows 1 through 2. (And of course Amiga, Atari ST/GEM, GEOS, Xt and SunView all mimicked the Mac to various degrees.)

Maybe, although some much older interfaces were 'flatter' than the more recent UIs of OS X and Windows (pre-8) for example. 'Traditional' attaches too much relation to time-span to it for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com