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The human capacity to read and decode symbols is only a recent cultural phenomenon within the great span of our anthropological history. Therefore our eyes have

The human capacity to read and decode symbols is only a recent cultural phenomenon within the great span of our anthropological history. Therefore our eyes have been naturally selected over eons to look at objects in the real world a lot longer then they have been selected to decode symbols. As a result, human eyes actually are better equipped to process shading, geometry and the complexity of physical objects better then it can process a symbol. Flat design is suppose to be more efficient, however based on our evolutionary history, an all out flat design actually increases the effort the brain needs to go through to process symbols. But really, this achieved efficiency doesn't matter as the difference between flat and adding some shading is negligible. What matters is whether or not we perceive the design as attractive, and that is a purely cultural and subjective factor. Flat design does have efficiency improvements but it's not where you think it is. The efficiency improvement is not on the user side, but for the developer. Anyone with the talent to make a cover photo, draw a flat square and paste some text on it can now call themselves a professional designer. Zero talent + minimal effort = Clean Minimal Design. Maybe I'm exaggerating on the amount of effort required but definitely you don't need the ability to paint like leonardo in order to make a minimal layout.

rtpg 12y ago
A good middlee between minimal and "realness" is material design, which plays off of what you are saying (the ease of the brain undrstanding layers and depth). The amount of effort for good minimal design and good "classical" design is probably the same for people well versed in either. But in either case you still need to learn about it to make it look ok. Shoddy things have always looked shoddy, no matter how many gradients you slap on it.
- normloman 12y ago
  Material design isn't a thing. It's Google's name for their design language, which is just flat design with more animations. It's not like there's a "school of material design" or a "theory of a material design." So I wouldn't suggest it as an alternative to flat / minimal design. It doesn't offer much of an alternative.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Material design isn't a thing Yes, it is. > It's Google's name for their design language Which is a thing. > which is just flat design with more animations. And depth, so not flat. Design languages like Windows Modern (or whatever the design language that used to be called "Metro" is called now) and Material Design are more clear and specific things than "flat" or "skeumorphic" design, which are just descriptors of one aspect of the design approach And, sure, most of them are evolutions of things that have gone previously and combine pre-existing elements without being revolutionary departures. But that doesn't make them not clear and specific things.
    - normloman 12y ago
      You're taking "isn't a thing" too literally. Yes, design languages are things. But material design is not a complete school of thought. It's one company's design language. Other companies are going to want their own design language, to distinguish themselves from their competitors. They can take inspiration from material design, but whatever you make can't be called material design. Google defines what material design is, and only they can put the material design stamp on something. And even though material design adds some depth, it's still pretty flat. Sure, cards and panels have a slight drop shadow behind them, but buttons still lack any bevel or border. This isn't much different from current flat designs. Many of them include depth in select places.
      - dragonwriter 12y ago
        > But material design is not a complete school of thought. Yes, it is. Its actually more of a "complete school of thought" than, e.g., "flat design", which is a vague, ill-defined, poorly-bounded element of an approach to visual design, not a complete school of thought on UI design. > Other companies are going to want their own design language, to distinguish themselves from their competitors. Some may, some may not. Design language is hardly the only potential axis of product or company differentiation. Furthermore, you can differentiate on design within the parameters of a design language like Material Design, because -- while fairly comprehensive -- it doesn't dictate all aspects of design. Defining consistency in the areas Material Design leaves open produces a distinct design that is still completely within the bounds of the Material Design.
ANTSANTS 12y ago
A symbol is a symbol. A flat monochrome floppy disk icon represents the concept of saving a file just the same as a lovingly rendered 3D floppy disk or even a photograph would. Text glyphs are very flat, abstract symbols that represent sounds or ideas (indeed, I'm pretty sure the whole "flat design" trend was inspired by typography in the first place). Sure, we've been hunting beasts for much longer than we've been reading and writing, but written language is still a very old invention in the human timescale. And art predates even that. Humanity has had plenty of experience with symbolic visuals over the ages, I think we're equipped well enough to use basic smartphone apps.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be. Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too. Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen. Modern minimalism only became fashionable a century or so ago, which was - coincidentally - around the time artists started experimenting with extreme abstraction. Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too. Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels. It's a difference of metaphorical and literal depth. Ignoring scale-dependence robs content of weight. So minimalism is literally shallow. It's aesthetic lossy compression - abstraction into illegibility, for the sake of abstraction. You can get away with that in art if you have something interesting to say. But it's really not the best of all possible solutions for UI/UX.
  - ANTSANTS 12y ago
    >Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be. >Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too. >Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen. But you don't see the depth of the stroke or the texture of the paper when you're reading. You see abstract lines. You don't see the imperfect squiggles our meat-appendages create unless you really focus; at a glance, your brain autocorrects them into the intended strokes. >Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too. >Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels. Uh, no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_font >So minimalism is literally shallow. "It seems that perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away." - Antoine de Saint Exupéry

rtpg 12y ago

A good middlee between minimal and "realness" is material design, which plays off of what you are saying (the ease of the brain undrstanding layers and depth). The amount of effort for good minimal design and good "classical" design is probably the same for people well versed in either. But in either case you still need to learn about it to make it look ok. Shoddy things have always looked shoddy, no matter how many gradients you slap on it.

normloman 12y ago
Material design isn't a thing. It's Google's name for their design language, which is just flat design with more animations. It's not like there's a "school of material design" or a "theory of a material design." So I wouldn't suggest it as an alternative to flat / minimal design. It doesn't offer much of an alternative.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Material design isn't a thing Yes, it is. > It's Google's name for their design language Which is a thing. > which is just flat design with more animations. And depth, so not flat. Design languages like Windows Modern (or whatever the design language that used to be called "Metro" is called now) and Material Design are more clear and specific things than "flat" or "skeumorphic" design, which are just descriptors of one aspect of the design approach And, sure, most of them are evolutions of things that have gone previously and combine pre-existing elements without being revolutionary departures. But that doesn't make them not clear and specific things.
  - normloman 12y ago
    You're taking "isn't a thing" too literally. Yes, design languages are things. But material design is not a complete school of thought. It's one company's design language. Other companies are going to want their own design language, to distinguish themselves from their competitors. They can take inspiration from material design, but whatever you make can't be called material design. Google defines what material design is, and only they can put the material design stamp on something. And even though material design adds some depth, it's still pretty flat. Sure, cards and panels have a slight drop shadow behind them, but buttons still lack any bevel or border. This isn't much different from current flat designs. Many of them include depth in select places.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > But material design is not a complete school of thought. Yes, it is. Its actually more of a "complete school of thought" than, e.g., "flat design", which is a vague, ill-defined, poorly-bounded element of an approach to visual design, not a complete school of thought on UI design. > Other companies are going to want their own design language, to distinguish themselves from their competitors. Some may, some may not. Design language is hardly the only potential axis of product or company differentiation. Furthermore, you can differentiate on design within the parameters of a design language like Material Design, because -- while fairly comprehensive -- it doesn't dictate all aspects of design. Defining consistency in the areas Material Design leaves open produces a distinct design that is still completely within the bounds of the Material Design.

ANTSANTS 12y ago

A symbol is a symbol. A flat monochrome floppy disk icon represents the concept of saving a file just the same as a lovingly rendered 3D floppy disk or even a photograph would. Text glyphs are very flat, abstract symbols that represent sounds or ideas (indeed, I'm pretty sure the whole "flat design" trend was inspired by typography in the first place). Sure, we've been hunting beasts for much longer than we've been reading and writing, but written language is still a very old invention in the human timescale. And art predates even that. Humanity has had plenty of experience with symbolic visuals over the ages, I think we're equipped well enough to use basic smartphone apps.

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be. Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too. Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen. Modern minimalism only became fashionable a century or so ago, which was - coincidentally - around the time artists started experimenting with extreme abstraction. Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too. Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels. It's a difference of metaphorical and literal depth. Ignoring scale-dependence robs content of weight. So minimalism is literally shallow. It's aesthetic lossy compression - abstraction into illegibility, for the sake of abstraction. You can get away with that in art if you have something interesting to say. But it's really not the best of all possible solutions for UI/UX.
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  >Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be. >Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too. >Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen. But you don't see the depth of the stroke or the texture of the paper when you're reading. You see abstract lines. You don't see the imperfect squiggles our meat-appendages create unless you really focus; at a glance, your brain autocorrects them into the intended strokes. >Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too. >Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels. Uh, no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_font >So minimalism is literally shallow. "It seems that perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away." - Antoine de Saint Exupéry