Why is flattening overnight a fad?

Do not know when, as if the overnight flat on the popular, whether it is web design or app design, everywhere to flat development, then exactly what is going on? Why does it feel like it's catching on in a flash?

In fact, flattening is no novelty. For web design, flat design is practical and easy to use. Flat Design 2.0 balances the practicality and aesthetics, and the design philosophy behind it has a long life.

What does flattening change? Let us uncover the mystery of flat design, look at its excellence, analyze its technical core, and explore which technologies will be passed on by fire.

What are we talking about when we talk about "flattening"?

Flat design can be traced back to the Swiss minimalist design (also known as the Internationalist Graphic design style), flat design in the preservation of the old paradigm while creating new things. The flat design of the five elements stripped out, from these five aspects we can see the real mystery of flattening.

1. Long Shadow

In most UI design elements, such as keystrokes, long shadows are often accompanied by bright-toned controls.

The shadow is often wide and tilted at a 45-degree angle, and the sharp corners make it recognizable. The right shade of the application can be stressed and make the flat icon more stereoscopic.

However, this long shadow has a tendency to be replaced gradually by the shadow of elegance. Wait for a shorter shadow effect in the future performance.

2. Light tone

Interestingly, the appearance of flat design makes bold and beautiful color application reborn. Designers use more fun and vibrant colors than ever before.

In fact, some designers even set up special websites to showcase their unique color schemes.

3. Simplified typesetting

When it comes to typography, flattened typography is not just about replacing fonts with Helvetica or boldface.

Of course, flattened typography should be made with a simple and readable font, which means that sans-serif and equal-width fonts are called inevitable choices. The best font should be to focus on the content itself.

Although font design is also a kind of art, designers should put the readability in the first place. Flat design makes designers pay more attention to the choice of fonts. Even serif fonts are simplified.

4. Virtual button

A transparent and clickable virtual keystroke that provides a visual interaction box without blocking the UI design.

Virtual buttons are not attracted to much attention because of their transparent, concise nature. At first, the virtual button appeared in the form of a revolutionary with a pseudo object design, and then made great progress in shape and detail. Virtual keypad and flat design complement each other, which constitutes a minimalist and abstract design style.

5. Minimalism and abstraction

Flat design is inherently minimalist. When the design inspiration does not originate from the real life, the materialization design texture is deserved to be discarded.

The rest, then, is the frame content with colors, gradients, shadows, shapes, and other visual nuances. Flat design in essence, forcing designers to be more creative-design services to content rendering, rather than the rendering of the real sense.

The concept of minimalism is not new, but it has recently become popular because of its clean beauty and the performance advantages of its website (such as reducing the load time of Web pages). This is reborn with a flat design, with a bright background, simple design, and a simpler design that turns into a lot of white leaves.

Prospect

The initial concept of flat design is to present the design framework with a square with no features and clearly discernible. But after merging with other popular design languages, the flat design itself has changed dramatically.

Flat design has become the trend of the industry overnight, but it will certainly take some time to develop and mature. Flat design of the early form of very radical want to make with the quasi-materialized Wei Jing, the minimalist design, but now the flat design gradually added to the decoration and texture.

Let's look at the near-flat design (almost Flat) or flat design of the designer Ryan Allen 2.0.

Most of the exquisite near-flat design is used in the Web field, the use of "parallax scrolling" can be displayed in a screen rich content.

Using simple features such as font and hue, the Canal TP company combines the animation with the Parallax scrolling to make the two paradigms great. This combination helps eliminate the side effects of overly simple flattening, making it more practical and useful for content-complex sites.

Flat design will not disappear too quickly, just will increase animation and interactive design to adapt to more complex sites. As we all know, "design follows content", flattening is the best design paradigm for presenting content.

Web design to practical for the first pursuit, every keystroke, click and slide should have a clear function and visual feedback. Most importantly, the UI controls need to have a unified style that allows users to ignore differences between the page and the device. These base controls will be extracted with their own features that flatten the icons.

Look at the appearance of the "Hamburger menu button"-whether you agree with it or not, it is now a commonplace navigation symbol.

The flat design is also gradually adding other details.

Many of the flat design or nearly flat design sites contain a large number of images, which are rarely seen on traditional websites. Flat color and typesetting and the perfect combination of pictures, this does not need to have too much decoration on the picture can be a modern style.

For example, some websites use the near flat design design style, uses the dark background picture in the webpage, the flat button, the navigation and the typeface, makes the website very intuitive concise, modern and easy to use.

As the designer Wells Riley suggests, always look at the usability and usability of your design. Beauty is just another dimension of design, and the real goal is to address user needs.

Postscript

Flat design does not actually have a recognized quantitative standard. As a design element, it can be used in a variety of higher-level design systems. It is often surprising to embed a flat design element in a variety of designs, such as a site with too much content, which can be adapted to the traditional graphic design by using flat design elements.