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It Is Not Flat Design. It's Just Proper Design
- zaidf 13y agoIf the content cannot do its job free from embellishment then it is bad content and/or employs bad hierarchy or contrast. That is like saying if a product can't sell itself without marketing, then it is a bad product. Such a claim assumes there is some universal definition of 'bad' and that if embellishment is needed to bring attention to an element, that its content must be bad. If you are going to make the above claim, you might as well make a case for living in a black and white world where the colors and design are mostly used to embellish otherwise bad things.
- bjterry 13y agoNot to mention the fact that there are many people in this world who have become millionaires off bad content, so excoriating it isn't necessarily useful, depending on your goals.
- pfortuny 13y agoThe quote is the axiom of minimalism (one could say "dogma" by the way it is pushed on others): decoration is WRONG. Which seems to me awkward at the very least. Just read Feynman's lectures. He does not simply share content. He embellishes it. Or Knuth's books. Content is not enough for human beings. I prefer the Renaissance to modern architecture. It just feels more human.
- rabino 13y agoI can cope with the amount of cliches and common places this presentation has, but my god, how can you suck at typography so much and speak about "good" and "bad" design.
- markdown 13y agoThe leading stood out so bad. More line-height needed.
- aneth4 13y agoEvery 2 years, a new design trend emerges and a bunch of hipster know-it-alls pop up from the woodwork espousing how the new trend was right all along, and what were all you incorrect designers thinking for the last 50,000 years. This deck is interesting and mostly a good way to look at many information presentation situations, but it is another instance of the recurring theme of annoying absolute statements from self-important designers. There is bad design, there is good design, there is no "proper" design, and any designer who claims so needs to check their ego at the door before you hire them. Design and style evolve, and much of it involves fashion, fad, style, and preference. These elements evolve over time, vary between situations, companies, and products, and are part of the character of the statement design makes. This presentation would be considered boring in some situations, depressing at others, ultrachic in others. Not everyone wants to sit on purple glowing cubes with a fernet milkshake under mood lighting in tight pants. Some people enjoy sitting on saddles, twirling their mustaches, and line-dancing the cowshit off their boots.
- onedev 13y agoPerhaps there is no good design? All design may just simply be bad. The goal of design may be the minimize it's awfulness. :)
- rwmj 13y agoThere is design that has been scientifically tested to be usable by humans.
- hawkharris 13y agoWell said. Exactly what I was thinking and wanted to verbalize.
- realguess 13y agoWell said. GeoCities design was "proper" a few years back, maybe it will resurrect again!
- booruguru 13y ago
- aneth4 13y agoEvery 2 years, a new design trend emerges and a bunch of hipster know-it-alls pop up from the woodwork espousing how the new trend was right all along, and what were all you incorrect designers thinking for the last 50,000 years. This deck is interesting and mostly a good way to look at many information presentation situations, but it is another instance of the recurring theme of annoying absolute statements from self-important designers. There is bad design, there is good design, there is no "proper" design, and any designer who claims so needs to check their ego at the door before you hire them. Design and style evolve, and much of it involves fashion, fad, style, and preference. These elements evolve over time, vary between situations, companies, and products, and are part of the character of the statement design makes.
- comex 13y agoBullshit. Flat design is a subjective fad just like skeumorphic design. More amusingly, this very presentation has a (subtle) background gradient, text shadow, a gratuitous fading animation between different background colors for different sections, and a 3D flip animation when you hover over a link, none of which are exactly hallmarks of "flat design".
- Joeri 13y agoThat's what slid.es gives you out of the box.
- lnanek2 13y agoMaybe the author shouldn't use slid.es then, since it doesn't agree with his presentation.
- itsybitsycoder 13y agoTotally agree about the backgrounds. There are even slight changes in the gradient between slides of the same color, which made it look like the whole slideshow was doing some weird wiggly thing every time I went to a new slide. Looking at some of the featured decks, it's totally possible to make a slideshow on slid.es without having wiggly, animated, gradient backgrounds that change colors every 5 slides, so this was kind of a weird choice.
- markdown 13y agoWould Rutledge be less interesting a person if he shaved off his facial embellishments? Does his substantial beard take away, or add to his persona? I wonder how he would fare if he were given the chance to design the website for the next Halo game.
- Cushman 13y ago> I wonder how he would fare if he were given the chance to design the website for the next Halo game. Very well put. The very idea that there could be a "proper" design is just patently false.
- kunai 13y agoReally? This hipster crap again? Flat design is just design. It's a type of design like anything else; there's nothing "proper" about it. It's not "proper" when people screw it up because they don't include sufficient visual interface cues which result in a drastic drop in usability (I'm looking at you, Microsoft). It's just design. People can execute it horribly, and other people, like, say, Google, can execute it remarkably well. What I find is that design is far too polarizing. There's no middle ground between skeuomorphic, three-dimensional, and flat interfaces. Why can't we have something like OS X 10.6, where there were elements of all design trends, and the result was a clean and very usable interface? Why did they have to fuck it up with 10.7 and the awful skeuomorphism? Why can't we have drop shadows? What is so "unproper" about them? Why can't we have gradients? Is it "unproper" to have those too? This conversation has gone on long enough, and I'm tired of it. Flat design is just design. End of story.
- mrtksn 13y agothere don't have to be a middle ground. remember some posts few days ago about complaining that we are going back to 1999? well, that's because good designers try to accomplish a goal, they find a way to make a crack in their way and everybody follows. now it's a trend, people with little analytic thought say "yes, this is the correct way of doing things" and exploit the new ideas but without thinking too much about it. this results in flood of poor designs of the current trend that don't serve any goal. later, some new technology emerges, some clever designer find even better way to accomplish a goal and now we have another trend emergeing and all the zombies follow until erode it, miss use the techniques and ideas. the cycle continues all the time. sometimes a new technology or platform makes possible to take an old idea even further in solving a problem. some clever designer exploits it and now we have a retro. of course, the mass degrades it again:) no middle ground exist, it's just cycles of progress.
- pondababa 13y agoHere's an article that was posted on HN a while back on a "middle ground between skeuomorphic, three-dimensional, and flat interfaces." http://www.matthewmooredesign.com/almost-flat-design/ http://www.matthewmooredesign.com/almost-flat-design/
- eropple 13y agoI was just thinking to myself how annoying the typography in this presentation is. Line height changes all over the place and is generally vertically cramped and annoying. The colors he chooses are chosen as if to be actively unpleasant (dark gray on blue?). I'm not unsympathetic to everything in his presentation, but the broadside of self-importance coupled with the bad design decisions in the document is pretty lame.
- FireBeyond 13y agoRight. The very opening content slide title? "Good content requires little embell- ishment." Line break his. Ew. And he's going to chastise other people design aesthetic?
- coldtea 13y ago>Line break his. Ew. And he's going to chastise other people design aesthetic? I wish people thought more before making comments like this. First, there's a slideshow service being used. Most aspects of the slideshow come from the service's engine, not from the guy who did the presentation. Second, there's no "line-break", much less it is "his". Get a larger monitor/device or enlarge the browser window. If you're seeing one, it's a hyphenation added by the slideshow service's CSS for widths under some size. Definitely not there for everybody, and definitely not "his".
- tommytsunami 13y agoI try to stay out of Design-related posts on HN, especially ones that mention 'Flat' or 'Skeuomorphic'. Everyone suddenly turns into Dieter Rams mixed with Jonny Ive. Although I don't love/hate this post either way, the comments in here for the most part are just awful, classic HN middlebrow dismissal at its best mixed with a spattering of ad hominem.
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- kmasters 13y agoThe terminal window seems to abide by the principles quite well. I know Im looking forward to it.
- john_w_t_b 13y agoInteresting point. Windows 3.1 had a fairly flat design too. http://toastytech.com/guis/win31default.png http://toastytech.com/guis/win31default.png Simplicity is more important than flat design. Can your interface be used by a five year old child or an eighty year old grandparent without instruction? Terminal does not pass that test.
- illicium 13y ago>Graphic embellishment should be as simple as possible without damage to its own clarity, contrast or textural purpose. Always try simplest first. On the left, I see two luggage tags. On the right, an iPhone and an iPad. Making your audience guess what your "deconstructed" visuals are actually supposed to be is not good -- it's mystery meat design. Speaking of meat, don't get me started on the hamburger icon.
- Yhippa 13y agoCan't we all just get along? There has to be a time and a place for skeumorphism (perhaps A/V controls) and flat design (an interface to an ATM).
- dclowd9901 13y agoAnd yet, this is the most wordy Slide deck about visual design I've ever seen. Seems the simplest way to convey the information would've been graphically.
- rubbingalcohol 13y ago...or maybe a blog post? Putting too much text in a slide presentation is a sure-fire way to confuse your audience. Are you paying attention to the speaker, or reading the slides? This should have just been an article.
- robmclarty 13y agoYeah, I'm not a fan of the slide-deck medium. Why couldn't this be a simple blog post page that I could scroll through quickly and easily if I wanted to refer to it? Slides are for secondary collateral in presentations, not communicating large chunks of text on the web.
- wittysense 13y agoTerminal. Vim. I doubt that we need to intellectualize this much. Otto Neurath and the Logical Positivists pretty much planned this. Design is now in the age of Visual Statistics: http://www.gerdarntz.org/content/gerd-arntz http://www.gerdarntz.org/content/gerd-arntz -- or from another perspective, "Content is King." Flickr and Kippt are now the Same Thing: http://imgur.com/iar7Bgn,t8cnZA3,2lXFz4a http://imgur.com/iar7Bgn,t8cnZA3,2lXFz4a Even that URL has their design suggested in its syntax. Imgur too. Kippt arguably has better engineering talent.
- GuiA 13y agoYou seem to be knowledgeable in that history of design/art topic. Any book recommendations?
- wittysense 13y ago1. [Visual Grammar](http://books.google.com/books/about/VISUAL_GRAMMAR.html?id=wewfi7MX4goC http://books.google.com/books/about/VISUAL_GRAMMAR.html?id=w...) by Christian Leborg 2. [Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465051359/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465051359/) by Don Norman 3. [The Elements of Typographic Style](http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Bringhurst/dp/0881791326 http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin...) by Robert Bringhurst 4. [Grid Systems](http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Graphic-Systeme-Visuele-Gestaltung/dp/3721201450/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1349151482&sr=1-2&keywords=joseph+grid http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Graphic-Systeme-Visuele-Gestal...) by Josef Muller-Brockmann 5. [Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design](http://www.amazon.com/Ordering-Disorder-Principles-Design-Voices/dp/0321703537?tag=httpembedly-20 http://www.amazon.com/Ordering-Disorder-Principles-Design-Vo...) by Khoi Vinh 6. [Why Customers Really Buy: Uncovering the Emotional Triggers That Drive Sales](http://www.amazon.com/Why-Customers-Really-Buy-Uncovering/dp/1601630417 http://www.amazon.com/Why-Customers-Really-Buy-Uncovering/dp...) by Linda Goodman (I've had the pleasure of meeting her and overhearing her office conversation during my daily tasks at the office in Houston, where she worked for a spell. Incredibly sharp, and it is clear that her principles exposed in this book are thorough-going in her interactions with people. I think it would be important to apply her research to Lean methodologies, building Features only around Emotional Triggers. This is what we are aiming at, but I am making this connection right now, I believe, in saying this.) 7. [Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems](http://www.amazon.com/Contextual-Design-Customer-Centered-Interactive-Technologies/dp/1558604111 http://www.amazon.com/Contextual-Design-Customer-Centered-In...) by Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt
- jcampbell1 13y agoI have a feeling a few years from now people are going to be writing stuff like: "Stop designing with a color palette that is appropriate for Fisher-Price. I am not a toddler, and I am sick of your preschool themed apps."
- bennyg 13y agoThis is already happening, I'd say.
- wildgift 13y agoMost "content" sucks. Most designs are a kind of content in themselves... and suck. That's why we have these awesome design fads.
- Julianhearn 13y agoCheckout his homepage it's full of embellishment, so he doesn't believe in what he is saying, it's just currently the trendy thing to say and hasn't had time to redesign his homepage to fit in what he's is preaching.
- robmclarty 13y agoYou're right. I checked out his homepage and it seemed like the opposite of what he was saying in his post (irony). But I think he made some good points nonetheless. Not necessarily that "flat design" is good design, but that Design's goal should be to enhance the communication of the content and not distract from it.
- Julianhearn 13y agoAgreed
- camus 13y agoflat design === big fad that everybody hate already.
- mbrock 13y agoi think people are just tired of talking about it because it's boring and people are really angry and upset for some incomprehensible reason
- mikecane 13y agoWorst part of that: "content design." I guess so we don't mistake it for, say, fashion design? Anyway, it'd be interesting to find out just how far back illustrations for text goes. Who was the first guy to propose adding "illumination" to manuscripts? And then how did that begin a pile-on to the point where the "illumination" was crass ornamentation to impress the higher-ups instead of being actually functional?
- petilon 13y agoIf you are talking about magazine pages then I totally agree, flat is preferred. But magazine pages are not interactive. Apps are interactive. Users need visual clues as to what they can manipulate and what they can't. This is where flat design fails. Flat design does not provide adequate perceived affordances.
- OGC 13y agoStopped reading after: *That's an important asterisk! More on this in a moment. Quality content. Or "good content" like the author calls it.
- crazygringo 13y agoI'm sorry -- while content in this slide deck is mostly correct, the title and conclusion are all wrong. What the content is describing is good design, particularly: - The more variations in embellishment contrast you employ, the weaker the content becomes and more complex the document becomes. - Embellishing content... to enhance context, to enhance contrast, to enhance clarity However, the criticisms of "flat design" generally run along the lines of not providing enough affordance (is that a label or a button?) and not providing enough contrast/clarity (making all the elements on the page look the same, leading to confusion and lack of hierarchy, instead of sufficiently differentiating them through the use of color, depth, shadows, etc.). The author then says that "visual interest" is an appropriate thing, but then says to use flat iPhone/iPad outlines, instead of photorealistic ones. Well, generally the photorealistic outline is going to look nicer, as long as your page isn't already too busy. It's a poorly chosen example. The author is trying to define away "flat design" as "good design", but that simply isn't the case. Flat design is a very specific design trend that is not the same as good design -- it can be used well, or used badly. Good design is good design period, and flat design can sometimes be very bad design.
- robmclarty 13y agoGood point. The flatness of the design is irrelevant. The clarity of the communication is paramount. I agree that the OP may be favouring that particular design trend in his examples a little too specifically which is distracting from his (I think, good) message. Funny that he's championing "good content" but confuses his argument that way.