
It Is Not Flat Design. It's Just Proper Design - kevin
http://slid.es/andyrutledge/its-not-flat-design
======
aneth4
Every 2 years, a new design trend emerges and a bunch of hipster know-it-alls
pop up from the woodwork espousing how the new trend was right all along, and
what were all you incorrect designers thinking for the last 50,000 years.

This deck is interesting and mostly a good way to look at many information
presentation situations, but it is another instance of the recurring theme of
annoying absolute statements from self-important designers.

There is bad design, there is good design, there is no "proper" design, and
any designer who claims so needs to check their ego at the door before you
hire them. Design and style evolve, and much of it involves fashion, fad,
style, and preference. These elements evolve over time, vary between
situations, companies, and products, and are part of the character of the
statement design makes.

This presentation would be considered boring in some situations, depressing at
others, ultrachic in others.

Not everyone wants to sit on purple glowing cubes with a fernet milkshake
under mood lighting in tight pants. Some people enjoy sitting on saddles,
twirling their mustaches, and line-dancing the cowshit off their boots.

~~~
realguess
Well said. GeoCities design was "proper" a few years back, maybe it will
resurrect again!

~~~
booruguru
GeoCities pages were never proper design. We made fun of it then just as we do
now.

------
kunai
_Really?_ This hipster crap again?

Flat design is just design. It's a type of design like anything else; there's
nothing "proper" about it. It's not "proper" when people screw it up because
they don't include sufficient visual interface cues which result in a drastic
drop in usability (I'm looking at you, Microsoft). It's just design. People
can execute it horribly, and other people, like, say, Google, can execute it
remarkably well.

What I find is that design is far too polarizing. There's no middle ground
between skeuomorphic, three-dimensional, and flat interfaces. Why can't we
have something like OS X 10.6, where there were elements of _all_ design
trends, and the result was a clean and very usable interface? Why did they
have to fuck it up with 10.7 and the awful skeuomorphism? Why can't we have
drop shadows? What is so "unproper" about them? Why can't we have gradients?
Is it "unproper" to have those too?

This conversation has gone on long enough, and I'm tired of it. Flat design is
just _design_.

End of story.

~~~
mrtksn
there don't have to be a middle ground.

remember some posts few days ago about complaining that we are going back to
1999?

well, that's because good designers try to accomplish a goal, they find a way
to make a crack in their way and everybody follows. now it's a trend, people
with little analytic thought say "yes, this is the correct way of doing
things" and exploit the new ideas but without thinking too much about it. this
results in flood of poor designs of the current trend that don't serve any
goal. later, some new technology emerges, some clever designer find even
better way to accomplish a goal and now we have another trend emergeing and
all the zombies follow until erode it, miss use the techniques and ideas.

the cycle continues all the time. sometimes a new technology or platform makes
possible to take an old idea even further in solving a problem. some clever
designer exploits it and now we have a retro. of course, the mass degrades it
again:)

no middle ground exist, it's just cycles of progress.

------
comex
Bullshit. Flat design is a subjective fad just like skeumorphic design.

More amusingly, _this very presentation_ has a (subtle) background gradient,
text shadow, a gratuitous fading animation between different background colors
for different sections, and a 3D flip animation when you hover over a link,
none of which are exactly hallmarks of "flat design".

~~~
Joeri
That's what slid.es gives you out of the box.

~~~
lnanek2
Maybe the author shouldn't use slid.es then, since it doesn't agree with his
presentation.

------
jcampbell1
I have a feeling a few years from now people are going to be writing stuff
like: "Stop designing with a color palette that is appropriate for Fisher-
Price. I am not a toddler, and I am sick of your preschool themed apps."

~~~
bennyg
This is already happening, I'd say.

------
eropple
I was just thinking to myself how annoying the typography in this presentation
is. Line height changes all over the place and is generally vertically cramped
and annoying. The colors he chooses are chosen as if to be actively unpleasant
(dark gray on blue?).

I'm not unsympathetic to everything in his presentation, but the broadside of
self-importance coupled with the bad design decisions in the document is
pretty lame.

~~~
FireBeyond
Right. The very opening content slide title?

    
    
      "Good content requires little embell-
      ishment."
    

Line break his. Ew. And he's going to chastise other people design aesthetic?

~~~
coldtea
> _Line break his. Ew. And he's going to chastise other people design
> aesthetic?_

I wish people thought more before making comments like this.

First, there's a slideshow service being used. Most aspects of the slideshow
come from the service's engine, not from the guy who did the presentation.

Second, there's no "line-break", much less it is "his". Get a larger
monitor/device or enlarge the browser window. If you're seeing one, it's a
hyphenation added by the slideshow service's CSS for widths under some size.
Definitely not there for everybody, and definitely not "his".

~~~
tommytsunami
I try to stay out of Design-related posts on HN, especially ones that mention
'Flat' or 'Skeuomorphic'. Everyone suddenly turns into Dieter Rams mixed with
Jonny Ive.

Although I don't love/hate this post either way, the comments in here for the
most part are just awful, classic HN middlebrow dismissal at its best mixed
with a spattering of ad hominem.

------
crazygringo
I'm sorry -- while content in this slide deck is mostly correct, the title and
conclusion are _all wrong_.

What the content is describing is _good_ design, particularly:

\- _The more variations in embellishment contrast you employ, the weaker the
content becomes and more complex the document becomes._

\- _Embellishing content... to enhance context, to enhance contrast, to
enhance clarity_

However, the criticisms of "flat design" generally run along the lines of not
providing enough affordance (is that a label or a button?) and not providing
enough contrast/clarity (making all the elements on the page look the same,
leading to confusion and lack of hierarchy, instead of sufficiently
differentiating them through the use of color, depth, shadows, etc.).

The author then says that "visual interest" is an appropriate thing, but then
says to use flat iPhone/iPad outlines, instead of photorealistic ones. Well,
generally the photorealistic outline is going to look nicer, as long as your
page isn't already too busy. It's a poorly chosen example.

The author is trying to define away "flat design" as "good design", but that
simply isn't the case. Flat design is a very specific design trend that is
_not_ the same as good design -- it can be used well, or used badly. Good
design is good design period, and flat design can sometimes be very bad
design.

~~~
robmclarty
Good point. The flatness of the design is irrelevant. The clarity of the
communication is paramount. I agree that the OP may be favouring that
particular design trend in his examples a little too specifically which is
distracting from his (I think, good) message. Funny that he's championing
"good content" but confuses his argument that way.

------
illicium
>Graphic embellishment should be as simple as possible without damage to its
own clarity, contrast or textural purpose. Always try simplest first.

On the left, I see two luggage tags. On the right, an iPhone and an iPad.

Making your audience guess what your "deconstructed" visuals are actually
supposed to be is not good -- it's mystery meat design.

Speaking of meat, don't get me started on the hamburger icon.

------
rabino
I can cope with the amount of cliches and common places this presentation has,
but my god, how can you suck at typography so much and speak about "good" and
"bad" design.

~~~
markdown
The leading stood out so bad. More line-height needed.

------
zaidf
_If the content cannot do its job free from embellishment then it is bad
content and/or employs bad hierarchy or contrast._

That is like saying if a product can't sell itself without marketing, then it
is a bad product. Such a claim assumes there is some universal definition of
'bad' and that if embellishment is needed to bring attention to an element,
that its content must be bad.

If you are going to make the above claim, you might as well make a case for
living in a black and white world where the colors and design are mostly used
to embellish otherwise bad things.

~~~
pfortuny
The quote is the axiom of minimalism (one could say "dogma" by the way it is
pushed on others): decoration is WRONG.

Which seems to me awkward at the very least. Just read Feynman's lectures. He
does not simply share content. He embellishes it. Or Knuth's books.

Content is not enough for human beings.

I prefer the Renaissance to modern architecture. It just feels more human.

------
Julianhearn
Checkout his homepage it's full of embellishment, so he doesn't believe in
what he is saying, it's just currently the trendy thing to say and hasn't had
time to redesign his homepage to fit in what he's is preaching.

~~~
robmclarty
You're right. I checked out his homepage and it seemed like the opposite of
what he was saying in his post (irony). But I think he made some good points
nonetheless. Not necessarily that "flat design" is good design, but that
Design's goal should be to enhance the communication of the content and not
distract from it.

~~~
Julianhearn
Agreed

------
markdown
Would Rutledge be less interesting a person if he shaved off his facial
embellishments?

Does his substantial beard take away, or add to his persona?

I wonder how he would fare if he were given the chance to design the website
for the next Halo game.

~~~
Cushman
> I wonder how he would fare if he were given the chance to design the website
> for the next Halo game.

Very well put. The very idea that there could be a "proper" design is just
patently false.

------
dclowd9901
And yet, this is the most wordy Slide deck about visual design I've ever seen.

Seems the simplest way to convey the information would've been graphically.

~~~
rubbingalcohol
...or maybe a blog post?

Putting too much text in a slide presentation is a sure-fire way to confuse
your audience. Are you paying attention to the speaker, or reading the slides?

This should have just been an article.

------
mikecane
Worst part of that: "content design."

I guess so we don't mistake it for, say, fashion design?

Anyway, it'd be interesting to find out just how far back illustrations for
text goes. Who was the first guy to propose adding "illumination" to
manuscripts? And then how did that begin a pile-on to the point where the
"illumination" was crass ornamentation to impress the higher-ups instead of
being actually functional?

------
petilon
If you are talking about magazine pages then I totally agree, flat is
preferred. But magazine pages are not interactive. Apps are interactive. Users
need visual clues as to what they can manipulate and what they can't. This is
where flat design fails. Flat design does not provide adequate perceived
affordances.

------
Yhippa
Can't we all just get along? There has to be a time and a place for
skeumorphism (perhaps A/V controls) and flat design (an interface to an ATM).

------
wildgift
Most "content" sucks. Most designs are a kind of content in themselves... and
suck. That's why we have these awesome design fads.

------
wittysense
Terminal. Vim.

I doubt that we need to intellectualize this much. Otto Neurath and the
Logical Positivists pretty much planned this. Design is now in the age of
Visual Statistics: <http://www.gerdarntz.org/content/gerd-arntz> \-- or from
another perspective, "Content is King."

Flickr and Kippt are now the Same Thing:
<http://imgur.com/iar7Bgn,t8cnZA3,2lXFz4a>

Even that URL has their design suggested in its syntax. Imgur too. Kippt
arguably has better engineering talent.

~~~
wildgift
The split between content and design is false. It just is. Typographers
sometimes need to rewrite copy (or request one) to fit. Photos need to be
cropped or scaled, or new ones chosen. Some kinds of writing or art really
demand a specific color scheme, or even a specific layout, to have a desired
effect.

~~~
wittysense
I'm inclined to agree that most, if not all, binaries are false, and like so I
thought I was saying that "Content is King" is another way of saying, but from
a different general perspective, "Design is Visual Statistics"; or at least
this is my assertion. As unclear as it may be, I'm not sure it says that
content and design have a split between them. At the same time, it's not
exactly clear to me that you are not attacking a strawman.

\- Content can be derivable, re-formatted, re-producible, summarized, re-
usable.

\- Design can be derivable, re-formattable, re-producible, summarizable, re-
usable. (Skeumorphs are obviously noise and prevent us from seeing the
inherent content-properties of design itself: like the concept of the "module"
as a form of content developers find uniquely interesting. And such aesthetic
gestures distract us from the content. Grid design, as one approach, entails
less noise; however, incurs the problematic of suffocating content in terms of
priority. Flat design designates that the design adapt to the content as a
first principle, in some fashion. Whatever the case we are in the age where
design is visual statistics. Over time, our designs are more indicative of the
way our cognitive systems structure the world rather than the way we project
our aesthetic values.)

In fact, I am saying that design and content are the same thing, and not that
they are different things...

Only that which is king is worthy of summarization (the sign).

------
kmasters
The terminal window seems to abide by the principles quite well. I know Im
looking forward to it.

~~~
john_w_t_b
Interesting point. Windows 3.1 had a fairly flat design too.

<http://toastytech.com/guis/win31default.png>

Simplicity is more important than flat design. Can your interface be used by a
five year old child or an eighty year old grandparent without instruction?
Terminal does not pass that test.

------
OGC
Stopped reading after:

*That's an important asterisk! More on this in a moment.

Quality content. Or "good content" like the author calls it.

------
camus
flat design === big fad that everybody hate already.

~~~
mbrock
i think people are just tired of talking about it because it's boring and
people are really angry and upset for some incomprehensible reason

