As much as Eli laments the fall of the highly detailed and skeumorphic fashion of yester year, he ridicules the fashion of the flat design movement of today. Both are still fashions. The difference is one is more appropriate for now. Looking at popular dribbble shots from 2015 and 2010, or Skeumorphic compared to flat, it would be incorrect to say that one shows more character, meaning and skill. No more than comparing a Matisse with a Manet. To say flat design has devalued a designers work is wrong. Although the time spent technically drawing a 2010 app icon compared to one drawn today would probably be a fraction, I’d like to think the labour of thought process hasn’t changed. Yes, there will be non designers who are taking shortcuts with the affordance of free UI kits and flat colour palettes and self building websites, but their work will still be spotted as amateur when compared to the design experts. To say users wont be able to tell the difference is a dangerous underestimation.

Eli is right that the perceived importance of craftsmanship in visual design may have decreased in popular opinion since the arrival of flat design. And I agree the importance of other areas in the digital design process such as UX and animation have exploded. But I don’t think this is a negative thing. Of course it is terrible for people who have potentially lost their jobs, but if any designer has lost their job because their sole job was to accurately render the texture of a basketball on a 120x120 app icon I would be very surprised. A designer should be more than just a technician.

What even is a real button anyway?

Another key theme in the argument is that the ‘expressive’ textured and shadowed design style is the foundation of a ‘user-centred experience’. Again I’d disagree, especially when we take the affordance given by button design as a focus point.

As smart phones have slowly taken over the world in the last 10 years the argument of skeumorphic design being needed to make users instinctively know how to work their way around a website is becoming increasingly moot. As new generations grow up with the prevalence of the web in the world, they increasingly don’t need buttons to look like physical buttons for them to realise it’s interactive.

Apart from your keyboard, tv remote and light switch how many physical buttons do you press a day? Now how many buttons on your smartphone and laptop screen do you press a day? It’s pretty clear that the patterns being built in software are much more likely to last the next decade than the real buttons on my tv remote. Why should we be constrained by designs of the past? We shouldn’t be thinking ‘we can give affordance the same way we have done for the last century’. We should be thinking ‘how do we give affordance for the next century’. Admittedly when iOS7 emerged, Apple hadn’t perfected this, but to make a shift happen, someone has to be brave enough to take a step down an unknown path.

Modern minimalism is here to stay. It shouldn’t be seen as the fall of the designer. It should be seen as the designer reacting justly to the new possibilities, technologies and expectations of the modern world.

For mostly modern minimalist designs follow me on dribbble or on twitter