All this talk about flat design and the new IOS7 look has really been heating up lately. I actually wrote a pretty lengthy blog about my reaction to the new apple flat look, but decided to scrap it as it came off very critical without much logical evidence to support many of my arguments. Essentially, my point was that the whole design looks unfinished and could have easily been whipped up in less time than it takes to boot up photoshop. I don't want to get into it, but some of the accusations that I had committed to paper came off pretty amateurish and weak. It wasn't really something that I wanted to publish. However, I took some of that energy that I poured into that essay and designed up a few "flat" icons of my own. Think of them as more than fun experiments. Nothing more.
This new metro flat trend really does have me intrigued. I suppose we can blame the rise of windows 8 for a lot of what we are seeing in modern UX. Maybe Google can take some of that blame too. In my essay, I had made an observation that as we move forward as a technological society, we will rely less and less on tangible objects. Take for instance the skeuomorphic qualities that apple had demonstrated. Their UX is very much tied to things that we recognize from the physical world and therefore play a huge part in how we interact with navigation. A button should look like a button. That is how we know that it can be clicked on. But I sort of sense that we are moving away from that idea because we are now trained to better understand how navigation works. After all, the internet as we know it today is well over 20 years old. Smart phone have been around for five years or more. By now, we should have the hang of it. Right?
In the end, I realized that all art and design is subjective and designers have a multitude of way to describe the directions that they take. So who really cares? Will this flat trend stick around? It's hard to say. In the meantime, dig these browser icons that I created. It was certainly a fun exercise and it forced me to trim down a lot of effects that I would normally use. I think we can all agree that embellishment in web design is so easy because photoshop allows us to see our visions come to life with only a few clicks of a mouse. Sometimes, it's kind of refreshing to scale back a bit and work within a few strict guidelines.
