Examples of a new style of Web Design for consideration.

[richinri]

http://www.hotscripts.com/blog/whats-fuss-flat-design/

[gwpriester]

It's a trend. But good design is good design.

A teacher of mine in art school said, and though this was a long time ago his message was timeless, don't try to be different to be good. Be good and you will be different.

[richinri]

What I find most interesting is it appears to actually be going backwards. Now we have 3D everything and people start saying, "Hey, let's go totally flat."

[Big Frank]

its just a design trend, as gary says
instagram is a trend
hopefully it too will die and be forgotten
fashion is for the fashion conscious
the rest of us wear faded jeans because we've worked them to death
i"'ve no idea where that came
maybe seeing the picture of karl lagerfeld on my dartboard
(that is already beginning to inspirie a xara image)

[pauland]

Thanks for an interesting link.

it appears to actually be going backwards. Now we have 3D everything

Some of us didn't ever see 3D as necessarily being cool (it can be, of course) and certainly we don't have 3D everything, just as we will never have flat everything.

The flat trend is hardly going backwards.

The majority of 3D extruded designs are poor and in company with rotating logos, refugees from the 1980's and 1990's.

As Gary says, good design is good design, 3D is not necessarily good just as flat can be poor.

Some people seem to consider their designs in isolation and want to construct elaborate icons that do not reflect the environment in which they exist - this can cause a great 3D icon to stick out like a garden gnome at a sculpture exhibition.

The trend for flat icons and design is driven by touch mobile and it would a poor design decision to build icon sets that don't reflect the environment in which they are used. Naturally, there is no 'one' environment out there, so having modern design on an old operating system is inevitably going to jar a little.

In terms of web design, you might think I am just totally anti-3d, but you couldn't be more wrong. I am totally against the idea that if you have a 3D tool that can extrude, then you should use it. Use it by all means, but don't produce something that was cool and clever twenty five years ago, but now looks dated and badly thought out.

One of my favourite sites was 'got milk' heavily 3D but refreshingly interesting and definitely not a bland throwback to 1990.

It also makes me think how much poorer we have become because of the kicking flash got from Steve Jobs.

http://www.northkingdom.com/case-studies/get-the-glass/

[Big Frank]

i'm going evern further back now

remember when nothing had a drop shadow?
that was a very very long time ago
the occasional drop shadow was done by hand by people who know how draw

and then photoshop got a drop shadow filter

as you say paul, just because you can, it doesn't mean you should

[Cloud]

I agree that flat has existed since the start of the web but in the bad old days it was implemented badly, that does not mean that all new flat design sites are good, in fact out of the hundreds I have seen this year only 10 or 12 stand out as good sites. It is a trend because everyone is talking about it suddenly but as I said it's design opposite skeuomorphism only really got the attention of most people with the implementation of ios and the iphone, flat design existed before that and will exist long after. As a designer the following may sound strange but I do not care about the design of a website, all I care about is that I can navigate it quickly and do what I need to on it, either finding the information I require or make a purchase, user experience is the most important thing, and the fact is that flat design lends itself to that perfectly. That is why I personally hate things like weird shaped navigation, or forever-scrolling single page sites or the god-awful parallax scrolling sites.

[steve.ledger]

.user experience is the most important thing, and the fact is that flat design lends itself to that perfectly. That is why I personally hate things like weird shaped navigation, or forever-scrolling single page sites or the god-awful parallax scrolling sites.

Absolutely.
The user experience is the first thing that should be considered.
Personal design fancy and using every trick, transition and CSS effect in the book with widgets all over the place is a recipe for instant FAIL.

[Cloud]

Also I want all users of xara to look at as many of these flat sites as they can and they will come to the same conclusion I have, 99% of them can be done in xara, and with the new version being html5 friendly it means that all those flat boxes of colour are not shown as pngs but code, so making everything clearer and quicker. For instance with the new features in web designer v9 (especially 'web page background handeling' ) how easy would it be to create this site in xara http://www.triplagent.com/ or this one http://inky.com/ or even this one http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us or here's a different one http://www.designzoom.in/

[jonazen]

Also I want all users of xara to look at as many of these flat sites as they can and they will come to the same conclusion I have, 99% of them can be done in xara, and with the new version being html5 friendly it means that all those flat boxes of colour are not shown as pngs but code, so making everything clearer and quicker. For instance with the new features in web designer v9 (especially 'web page background handeling' ) how easy would it be to create this site in xara http://www.triplagent.com/ or this one http://inky.com/ or even this one http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us or here's a different one http://www.designzoom.in/

Good discussion... "triplagent" seems to be offline now -- could only get it via Google cache. Inky seems to be a pretty typical example of so many of the flat sites I'm seeing recently. DesignZoom is a good example too (along with their portfolio). I actually don't like the windowsphone site -- it seem that their flat "metro" design is at odds with the 3d-looking photos of the phones themselves. The phone are thin with rounded edges -- and they *do* show shadows from the phone on the background -- but the phone images appear very severely cropped; reminds me of the too-cropped images of models on magazine covers, where you can tell that they've shaved off some parts they think should be slimmer (but now, of course, with good photoshop or DPX9 skills, the goal can be accomplished more gracefully). Maybe not a huge issue (or none for most people?) but I find it a bit jarring, visually. It may not indicate a *problem* per se with the design concept, but I think it illustrates one of the areas that a designer will have to be aware of when putting these together.

I'm also finding it a bit annoying to see so many of the "me too" implementations of the concept. If this is going to work at all, it will need more variety and originality -- and hopefully, these sites won't all make you scroll down enormously long pages to find the embedded pseudo pages -- that's just...annoying.

Anyway - as has been said, if it's just one more tool in your bag of tricks (who here remembers Felix the Cat?), great. If it becomes an imperative I think it's a mistake. I agree that it's something of a fad...some sites will work with this model, and others won't.