design is about solving problems given constraints. flat design is oftentimes (more-so in the past than right now) a reasonable solution for the web, due to constraints related to latency (sending graphics over the wire) and the computational cost of rendering complex graphics/interfaces. from that perspective, flat design makes total sense to me, even if I don't always care for it personally. browsers can't even agree on how to render vector graphics or what falls on CPU vs GPU. projects like pathfinder[1] are sorting some of that out, but we've got a long way to go. flat design is only a very small percentage about aesthetics.
IMO, flat design takes the "best for the most for the least" approach of charles and ray eames (and so many others who followed the same ethos but maybe stated it less eloquently), and perverts "the least" to mean least amount of effort/money for the computer (or, cynically, the designer as well), rather than for the user. it either skews the idea of a design constraint, or highlights problems with the web as a platform. whatever flat design accomplishes, it isn't perfect for all cases, but it isn't necessarily bad, either. we just have to remember that as technologies mature, it's always possible we're designing for constraints that no longer exist.
I say this a lot, but when talking about web design, in retrospect, flash was like future alien technology that got taken away from us. although I understand the attack surface that came with it and why it had to go.
It seems like you've made an reasonable explanation but it doesn't follow the timeline of how things happened. Flat design has been coming about recently after significant increases in hardware and network capabilities. Current web apps that use flat designs are just as heavy as any other.
> Flat design has been coming about recently after significant increases in hardware and network capabilities
sorry, I should have emphasized the web/browser part of my explanation more. the chip in an iphone could support these things, but could safari? we didn't even have a <video> tag back then. 3D transforms in CSS were brand new (i.e. unusable if you wanted to support legacy browsers), same for WOFF files, requestanimationframe, drop shadows, and so many other modern conveniences. 4G was also brand new -- and uncommon. the web was going through some serious growing pains, and that's just in the highly developed world -- this doesn't really touch on the global availability/use/implementation of the tech we're talking about. it's possible my timeline is off, but designers were still constrained by those doing the engineering during this time. maintaining web apps with hacks to support as many browsers as possible was a nightmare. and so compromises were made -- clearly. and I think flat design came out of that, for better and for worse.
> Current web apps that use flat designs are just as heavy as any other.
that's what I was getting at toward the end of my comment with regard to observing constraints that may no longer actually exist.
Yes, and I was suggesting that the motivation was not due to constraints as the trend emerged degree after these constraints were long since relevant. I tend to agree with other comments here that it has come to serve as fashion (different for its own sake) rather than any UI/UX benefit.
ah, yes, I agree with you on where we're at now, it's not coming from any sort of necessity currently. my initial comment was only meant to say "there's a time and light in which this might have made some sense."
That might make some sense for the web, but doesn't explain it for iOS and macOS, etc.
Apple started pushing flat design just as we were getting high-resolution retina displays for phones. Since the UI art wasn't defined with a vector format, the minimalist icons for flat design was still being provided in big multi-resolution .pngs, so there was little or no savings on resources.
So those UI image files could just as easily contain detailed shaded and/or textured images that make the most of a high-res color display.
IMO, flat design takes the "best for the most for the least" approach of charles and ray eames (and so many others who followed the same ethos but maybe stated it less eloquently), and perverts "the least" to mean least amount of effort/money for the computer (or, cynically, the designer as well), rather than for the user. it either skews the idea of a design constraint, or highlights problems with the web as a platform. whatever flat design accomplishes, it isn't perfect for all cases, but it isn't necessarily bad, either. we just have to remember that as technologies mature, it's always possible we're designing for constraints that no longer exist.
I say this a lot, but when talking about web design, in retrospect, flash was like future alien technology that got taken away from us. although I understand the attack surface that came with it and why it had to go.
1. https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder