This post is part of a series I’m working on. The first part, “Material is the metaphor”, can be found here. The second, “Authentic Motion”, can be found here.

In recent times, the most popular interface design debate on the internet has been skeuomorphism vs flat design. Apple, until last year, was by and large considered the champion of the former. However, their UI design had been receiving significant flak for quite some timing as looking “dated” and “boring”, particularly when compared to the work Microsoft had done with its Metro/Modern UI.

It’s no surprise that almost immediately after Google introduced Material Design to the world, we had people trying to label it one way or the other. Unfortunately, a large part of the people who took part of the debate had no clear understanding as to what constitutes skeuomorphism and what constitutes flat design.

For most, any design that wasn’t skeuomorphic was, in fact, flat. And looking at the focus on bold colors and large imagery, one could see a lot of visual resemblance with Metro/Modern UI. For example, here’s a comparison of iTunes, a mock up of a Material Design music player, and the one on Windows 8.