Guide on Flat Design An Evolving Trend

Web Design Toronto team state that the flat design movement has evolved over time, and we’re now at its peak. Take a look at where we’ve been and where we’re going next.

Flat Design 101

Flat design was the audacious response to the over-realistic and frequently phony three-dimensional features and textures that inundated the internet in the early 2000s. Apple, which was using a very realistic style at the time, was partly responsible for this trend as icons on its app store and devices. After it began, other companies adopted the same style in an attempt to match their level of sophistication.

The term “flat design” is somewhat misleading. It was designed to be more user-friendly, and it indeed looked simpler than previous paradigms. In reality, the style’s simplicity belies a rather complicated system that hides many details from view and maintains consistency at every level of the website architecture. A high color palette, simple typefaces, and optical balance are among the main tools of this style.

The drawback with truly flat design is that it was not always the case. Some people thought the stripped-down designs were too basic to assist them navigate the design. However, most designers loved it. Because it endures, flat design is without a doubt one of the biggest and most innovative visual trends of the previous decade.

Material Design

It’s critical to examine the material design, the visual language Google established for its products and apps, in order to comprehend why flat design evolved so swiftly.

The Material Design aesthetic is a combination of flat design and 3Dimensional effects, which provides an almost tangible appearance. The idea focused on integrating the digital world with reality by utilizing tactical highlights and natural motion to create a symbiosis between real life and technology.

It brought back principles such as drop shadows, which suggested it “softened” the almost harsh appearance of early flat design.

Material design is a well-known idea with a wealth of Google’s ever-changing material documentation. It, too, develops in response to trends and user demands. Why is it so essential for flat that it drove the progress of flatter to such an extent?

Flat 2.0

2.0 is simpler to use since it combines the finest features of flat design with additional user interface cues to assist you in developing website design that is both attractive and useful. It’s also highly adaptable and compatible with most ideas. Unlike some of the purest flat designed sites, Flat 2.0 integrates elements of flat with modest modifications to make them less taxing for customers to view.

Flat 2.0 enables designers to violate the hard rules of flat design and reintroduce some of the techniques that make visuals more engaging (in moderation, of course).

• Highlights
• Gradients
• Multiple tints and color values
• Drop shadows
• Any color palette (not just super bright)

Flat 2.0 isn’t a world in which everything is an UI element or icon. Flat 2.0 interfaces rely on photographs and videos to a significant extent. (Many early flat design purists believed that these aesthetic elements diluted the intent of the style.)

Flat 2017

Most designs nowadays fall somewhere in the middle of all of these trends and concepts. Flat types are still prevalent, but there’s a lot more to the designs than that. This change hasn’t been given a name yet, but you can see certain elements in many website layouts.

Here’s what flat design is like in 2017:

Flat Elements

Many of the button designs and user interface components from previous flat design projects have remained. The conventional button style is a rectangle box with square or somewhat rounded edges, with white or black text. Logos and icons also adopted a flat look, which works well with a more complicated homepage design.

Bold, Bright Colors

The web has gotten a little more cheerful since pastel palettes and general acceptance of more color from flat patterns. This has evolved into a popular current design trend of utilizing bright color gradients on websites as the primary visual or as a picture overlay.

Minimal Homepages

Homepages, on the other hand, are typically less cluttered and prioritize single tasks. Even with many components, a single user direction or action makes the whole project appear less busy.

Better Typography Everywhere

Stripped-down designs had to concentrate on effective type. The growing usage of better type kits and web typefaces, in combination with the notion, has made it simpler for designers to focus on typography online.

Integrated Motion and Feedback

The concept of the feedback loop when it comes to visuals and communication with customers was one of the most important takeaways from material design.

Plenty of Whitespace

Screens have gotten larger (on desktops and mobile devices), which designers are taking advantage of by using it as whitespace to maintain the flat style’s minimal feel. (And, most of the time, this extra space isn’t white.)

Flat Layers

Layered content with no decoration may look excellent and provide more information to readers.

Oversized Design Elements

Large text, large images and large buttons and icons are pretty much the norm, thanks to even the earliest projects using flat design.

Conclusion

Flat design has made our online experiences better in many ways. It’s easier to read, it’s more user-friendly, and most importantly, it just looks nicer.

The best part about this movement and the reason it continues to thrive is that it’s flexible enough to change with ease. Designers may incorporate the most effective aspects of flat design into just about any project by extracting them from flat design. That’s why we continue to see so much of it in today’s designs, and why flat design wasn’t a passing fad after all.