As a result, a more mature and balanced interpretation of flat design has emerged. Designers are finding they can be "authentically digital" and explore the unique opportunities of the medium without compromising usability. This newer interpretation is sometimes referred to as "semi flat," "almost flat," or "flat 2.
As with any design trend, we advise balance and moderation. Scaling back from those excesses is good for usability. But removing visual distinctions to produce fully flat designs with no signifiers can be an equally bad extreme. If your UI uses a flat design, make sure you follow the best practices to avoid its pitfalls.
She conducts research and leads training seminars to help digital product teams expand and improve their UX practice. Her research findings and recommendations are informed by her background in information theory and design, as well as her development experience. The latest articles about interface usability, website design, and UX research from the Nielsen Norman Group.
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Some examples of sans serifs that look great with flat design include Telegrafico and Junction. With the right designer, your flat design might just jump off the screen. Our newsletter is for everyone who loves design! Let us know if you're a freelance designer or not so we can share the most relevant content for you. By completing this form, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Designers, check out these contests so you can start building your career. Get a design. What is flat design? Via Nintendo. Breaking up information on a page with different background colors. Give each paragraph a separate punch by displaying it over its own color. Using specific color combinations to tell the viewer how to relate to certain images and information. Via Bauhaus Dessau. Via Osnat Fine Art. A flat design by BryanMaxim. You're in! You proved us right again.
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Sign me up! Graphic design is able to change the mood and message via the slightest changes of shapes and shades, letters and spacing. Today we are going to focus our attention on one of the most popular directions of modern graphic design called flat design. Today, the term «flat design» is applied to graphics for numerous purposes and tasks which have common stylistic features. Flat design is the direction which found its broad and diverse expression on digital art and is famous for minimalistic and concise use of visual expressive means.
Nowadays the term is widely used as the opposite to «rich design» due to harmonic simplicity taken as the basis of this design approach. The most prominent feature which actually has inspired the name of this direction is applying flat 2-dimensional visual details as the opposite to highly realistic and detailed skeuomorphic images.
Flat design has been developing actively for the last couple of years covering more and more fields of graphic design still finding the broadest and most diverse application in the sphere of digital design for web and mobile interfaces. This design approach is found as the style favorable for enhancing usability and visual harmony of user interfaces. Its roots are usually set in Swiss style which historians of design sphere find its direct ancestor.
Swiss style, also known as International Typographic Style or shorter International Style, is the direction which appeared and got its dose of criticism in s and later won its bright expression in graphic design in Switzerland of —50s fairly becoming the solid foundation of graphic design of mid 20th century around the world.
According to Design Is History portal, the brief description of key features of this style is the following: «…the style favored simplicity, legibility and objectivity. Of the many contributions to develop from the two schools were the use of, sans-serif typography, grids and asymmetrical layouts. Also stressed was the combination of typography and photography as a means of visual communication. The primary influential works were developed as posters, which were seen to be the most effective means of communication.
The posters featured here as examples make it obvious that fans of this style liked simple forms, bold and strict fonts of high readability level, harmonic and geometrically based combinations of details, flat illustrations and clear visual hierarchy.
It quickly grew more and more popular in different countries of the world and got its new life in the art of early 21st century.
Although this style got a variety of expressions in the sphere of visual design for print, like posters, stamps, postcards, book covers, magazines etc. Websites and mobile applications going through dynamic development of creative search opened the amazing and fruitful perspective for this minimalist and functional approach to design solutions. The style got the name «flat design» which became instantly popular and started a new direction in graphic design daring skeuomorphism and «rich design» and supported with new challenges opened by the field of interaction design.
The first step to boosting flat UI popularity in digital products was taken by Microsoft presenting new flat and minimalist style of their products: this movement started in early s and was widely adopted in the products of , in particular in mobile interface design for Windows Phone 7. The basic features of flat design such as intuitive simple shapes, bold clear typography, bright contrast colors, long shadows, absence of complex details and textures found their further development leap in when Apple released iOS 7 based on the principles of flat graphic as the basis for user-friendly intuitive interfaces.
It could be also said some key principles of flat design found their expression in Material Design for Google, still with some deviants like drop shadows etc.
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