I think games can help?
Apple didn’t start the flat movement, but boy did they make the internet explode in all affected areas of design trolling, blogging, web design, app design, and then some. Android’s been doing it. Microsoft started a long time ago. And before that, we had very niche designers, whom I suppose predicted the arguments of the future creating flat/minimal work before there was flat.
You see, I love flat designs. I love clean, minimal, smart designs. I love realism (skeumorphic) designs too. I love when my UI mimics the beautiful things I see in real life. I love how well games, when successful, have made their art match the emotional quality of their mechanics and story.
Games have yet to take on design trends of web and mobile for design’s sake — thank god. Considering I love game design as much as any user experience, I began thinking of why games get to look how they want to look while no one argues about which trend is right or wrong, better or worse. And I began thinking of CONTEXT instead of TRENDS.
There are already countless blogs from reputable sites recapping the changes of 2013, and upcoming for in 2014 in design. Every new Dribbble post seems to be flatly designed. New start-ups are showing us beautiful ideas for vector-based icons to make our verbs universal (See NounProject.com). Other design shops are showing their portfolios with the latest trendy paralax-circular-Helvtica Neued-partially opaqued-diffused layer-designs and all companies seem to be clamoring to keep up with this latest redefined image.
Then I remembered, I have to think of context (which is what makes design great) and not the latest in stylization. A weather app, a calendar app, productivity, utilities — ok. They work well now that we see redesigns. And I’m fine with that. Some hardware products have companion apps (lots have been redesigned to flat).
My first thought is we have discovered (only by the mass movement — I do wonder if the tipping point was Apple) that flat works nicely because we see it on small screens. Tiny screens, no matter how pretty the graphics (say, Infinity Blade) the grand experience gets lost because it is simply impossible to concentrate and/or aborb the detail to become immersed — it’s a flaw of our comparatively poorly evolved eyes. We all know too much of anything on a screen, especially a small one, makes for a confusing user experience — which is what all this new software styling is about. But we’ve known about our tiny screen issues for a while. It’s why we’ve all seen actual innovations in layout, gesture functions, UI elements grouping functions or items together, clearing out UIs and our minds. We did all this before flat designs and we congratulated designers for changing how we used apps. Who remembers Facebook’s first app and their icon grid? It was ugly and no one gave a crap about choosing news feed over event calendars. Users wanted the news feed. Facebook turned around, not with flat, but putting the things users didn’t care about out of the way (off to a hidden left navigation panel), and we hailed the thumb swipe to reveal the “other stuff” as genius. And we got our news feed.
And I think that’s the annoyance of this arguement. Flat designs are quite pretty — again I’ve said how much I love them. But I like realism too. So, I’m ambivalent about which to use because flat is (usually) about style and not function. Maybe we haven’t noticed yet, but I think I’ve starting to find a deceleration of innovating our mobile experiences. We aren’t thinking about user experience as context, but as aesthetics.
We have begun, as a community of designers, to slowly and silently make shapes a standard for function — like circles for buttons or minimal icons for verbs. We are making sure only color is used to define contrast. So, when is it ok to not produce an artifact as a trend and design something because it’s beautiful in context? Shouldn’t we be figuring out, not the latest way to make something flat and invisible, but how we think of user experience and matching that beauty in art to follow a grand function in our designs?
If flat creates contrast using only color and rids itself of texture, then when can using a fuller design method be ok and not considered outdated or suddenly uglier? Meaning when can size, texture, quantity of elements, shape/form, AND color still make beautiful designs. We can’t get rid of Gestalt theories, as our brains will relay them anyway. And now, in the age of digital, animations and interactions add to contrast and/or feedback with movement and speed.
These now “older” methods of realism haven’t been forgotten in architecture or product design — and yes those examples are “hard” designs and not “soft” — but we agree (and learned in school) what makes beautiful designs.
Context. Flat makes minimizing UI easier. Realism has a better chance of cluttering our tiny screens. We all know designing isn’t easy, so let’s continue problem solving, creatively in context, without the bias of trend. As a designer I don’t want to get stuck in a trend. I want to make whatever beautiful design fits the context of a product or service. If lighting and texture help my Bang & Olufsen app look like the insanely gorgeous designs of their hardware, I’d love my iPhone to look like I’ve been transported inside that same dedicated work. And yes, I understand how subjective that sounds, and I don’t care. *Note: I don’t own B&O products because I don’t have that kind of cash, and I have no idea if they even makes apps* But I like my idea of context. I like games and how their immersive quality works, in part, because of its aesthetics, even their UI.
I believe there is something to our ideas of user experience that games have always been very good at. Lo-fi 8-bit gives us a particular feeling while AAA titles give us another. But both are not wired to trends. Games fit their context, only, and every time. Why can’t all our designs be made equal?