Thoughts on flat design?

[Kyng]

From around 2013 onwards, there's been a very noticeable change in the design of company logos, and other graphics such as buttons. They used to have all kinds of 3D glass effects and bevelled edges; however, these have increasingly fallen out of favour, with many new graphics instead utilising a 2D flat design. This was arguably driven by the user interface design of iOS 7.0 - but since then, it's expanded to other designs across the board. So, what are your thoughts on this?

Personally, I cannot stand most of these flat, 2D brand logos. I am not a minimalist - and to me, most of them look like they were either drawn by children, or they come from the past (and not in a good way that I'm nostalgic about). With that being said, flags are a gigantic exception to this: I think they have to be simple, because they need to be recognisable from a distance (and they also often get used as emoticons and thumbnails, at which size any complex details would simply be lost or look messy). Another exception is fonts: I appreciate that it's important for text to be readable at a variety of different sizes (so for example, I prefer the current Google logo over the previous one, because I think the new font just scales better). But apart from a few limited exceptions such as flags and fonts, I'm personally not a fan of this design trend.

What about you?

[Moonshroom]

I'm not huge on minimalistic design, but I can at least see what it is trying to accomplish... I mean, load up any surviving site from the early 2000s and see how busy it is, how many things fight for your attention at once. A flat logo or interface doesn't trigger any second glance in your brain because it is simply undeserving of one - as soon as the vague shape you glanced over is confirmed to be correct, you move on to the content itself and that can only be a good thing.

That said, everything looking like a half-baked vector ends up feeling kinda soulless and bland.

[Kyng]

I'm not huge on minimalistic design, but I can at least see what it is trying to accomplish... I mean, load up any surviving site from the early 2000s and see how busy it is, how many things fight for your attention at once. A flat logo or interface doesn't trigger any second glance in your brain because it is simply undeserving of one - as soon as the vague shape you glanced over is confirmed to be correct, you move on to the content itself and that can only be a good thing.

That said, everything looking like a half-baked vector ends up feeling kinda soulless and bland.

Yeah, true. I'm not saying "More complex = automatically good", because there does come a point where things look too busy and cluttered. To illustrate this, I'll pull up the BBFC's old and new rating symbols:


(Source: The Independent)

On the top are the symbols that were used from 2002-2019. Like a lot of logos from the 2002 era, they're quite complicated - and in particular, I'm not a fan of the prominent repeated 'bbfc' lettering in the background, which is just distracting. By the late 2010s, they were looking seriously dated: they were massively out of step with the latest design trends, and IMO they were in dire need of a refresh.

With that being said, I'm even less of a fan of the new symbols used since 2019 (on the bottom). To me, they have the opposite problem: they're just too simple for my tastes. And going back to what I said in my opening post, about "some of them look like they come from past"... if I had to take a blind guess at when these symbols were from, I would've guessed the 1980s. It feels like a backwards step - because to me, these symbols look even older than the ones they replaced!

Surely there has to be some kind of middle ground, where these graphics are complex enough to not look bland, but also simple enough to not look busy?

[Moonshroom]

Surely there has to be some kind of middle ground, where these graphics are complex enough to not look bland, but also simple enough to not look busy?

I'm sure there is, but it is not gonna come from a commercial app - no-one wants to put up the logo that breaks the visual harmony, that gets ridiculed by its appearance. And if the big companies don't do it, then the smaller ones won't touch the idea with a ten foot pole, because they are there to capitalize in good ideas left behind by the big game players, not to innovate.

What a nice Catch-22 we have built for ourselves here.

[Kyng]

Guess it'll have to be me who breaks the visual harmony, then .

Anyway, I completely forgot to mention: another example of flat design that I like is Font Awesome. This is a set of thousands of icons that can be displayed at all kinds of sizes (typically, small sizes). In order to fulfil this role effectively, they have to be clean and simple - although there are multiple variants, including solid ones, outline ones, and even two-tone ones.

Now, it is possible to overuse them. They're probably not good for prominent images, such as logos (for these, something more unique is required). But for little things like buttons, which would often otherwise be text-only, they're very useful !