I'm already tired of guessing what is and isn't a button.
Bonus points if you mention the last time a particular trend surfaced.
How could it possibly be anything else?
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.
For some reason, we designers are still designing with this mentality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
Obviously someone does.
I wonder whether this is because flat design does away with all the helpful instinctive visual cues that were developed over the last decades (e.g. shadows, faux-3d borders etc) and needs to find new colours because there's no other way of expressing relationships?
Is it the case that designers have been forced to come up with 'more' colours under duress because of this, and have to try out new colours? Or is it that people genuinely like them? Or does 'like' not come into it? Or is there just one very influential designer at e.g. Google who has a different aesthetic to me?
EDIT: I'm commenting on the colours on the page linked to this discussion. Not colours in general.
I did an unsolicited redesign of a wikipedia article page a few months ago (mostly a tweak to the current layout). Although Wikipedia is a website rather than an app, the site's pages are are quite stark and many pages feel bereft of colour. In my (unsolicited) redesign I added colour to soften the appearance of the page and to highlight elements. Are the colours superfluous? Or do they make the page or site more pleasant to read? Opinions very welcome :-)
Older people are a great example of why consistency matters. Whenever I show my ageing mother a new website and it isn't incredibly clean + simple to look at it. Her brain shuts right off, she stares at it and waits for me to do something with it.
The first time she saw Android on her new Nexus she immediately was able to start tinkering with it. Flat design, limited colour and gradients, fewer distractions.
I don't understand the complaint about the colours being used on flat designs. Do you have your screen brightness turned all the way up? Turn it down you might notice how bland and grey a lot of older websites look - bevels don't save them.
My search results come up as cards with a tiny sliver of map, then I click on the map and they all disappear, sometimes if I scroll around desperately some will load eventually. But all I wanted in the first place was a full screen map with some icons, not one by one cards to click, also with tiny slivers in them.
Not even an isolated incident. I takes half a dozen clicks when getting directions now as well and several other tasks. I don't think the Google graphics designers are being forced to perform usability studies like they should be. If they were, they would realize some level of 3D actually helps users determine what is clickable or not.
I like interfaces that have nice 3D effects, especially on a window manager. I like high information density. I like being in control and having a customisable experience. Metro flies in the face of all of those.
Flat UI means less code and easier maintainability. It holds up better across a wide range of sizes. It makes it easier to have a style guide in code and create reusable modules. This allows the design team to focus on the bigger-picture user experience instead of perfecting button gradients.
High information density is great in many applications, especially interfaces supporting complex tasks for expert users. However, it takes a lot of work to design a great high-density interface. I feel like most of the high density interfaces I see are more of a case of the design or product teams not being able to make hard decisions about what's really important.
While some flat UIs certainly go too far in the other direction, I firmly believe that minimalism encourages good design by forcing a conversation about what information to prioritize. Especially for the mainstream consumer web, this is almost always better for everyone.
Finally, I don't appreciate this kind of attack on my profession. Good design is far closer to engineering than to taste. I don't think I'm hoodwinking people into hiring me.
Seems a little unfair.
This is one of the biggest crimes of flat design. Let's throw away all the opportunities for high information density and replace them with flat blocks of color!
http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_13.html
(2.x went bevelled, and none of us looked back)
Here is a recolored screenshot using the UI colors cited above: http://oi60.tinypic.com/140yiqr.jpg
Now it only needs some font aliasing and it is fit for a revival.
http://xwinman.org/screenshots/blackbox.jpg
http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2011/235/4/8/darko_blackbo...
It's a pretty good intermediary until — one mythic day — we can access the clipboard via js.
EDIT. Link to relevant stack overflow answer describing the flow: http://stackoverflow.com/a/17528590/2236561
they don't. I've seen this page many times over the past year.. same colors every time.
But who was first?
This site never seems to copy the colour code first time.
Hey dummies: Flat design is a concept. It's not a fashion trend with specific "in" colors.
Some time ago, a bunch of idiots got their hands on UI design, and are turning into a fashion show.
