The creation of flat design was the result of development in responsive designs. As skeuomorphic designs were not that much compatible with application responsiveness. Due to the increase in mobile usage users shifted to small screens and it became a necessity for brands to come up with some new designs that may become more pro to responsiveness. Where the flat design came to the rescue.
Flat Design
What is Flat Design?
UI design design that focuses on simplicity and minimalism is known as Flat Design. This was an upgrade from skeuomorphism. It uses 2D elements and subtle colors to create a clean and modern look. Flat design is clean and simple making it easier for the user to surf through the application. By removing unwanted elements and adding subtle colors, a flat design makes the appearance of the application a visual delight and results in a user-friendly experience.
Why Use Flat Design?
- Simplicity: The most important feature of flat design is its simplicity. It is based on a low amount of gradient, removing unnecessary elements resulting in more focus on main content. This simplicity of flat design enhances user experience.
- User-Centric: Flat deign focuses on user needs and there priorities. By removing unwanted elements the design makes the interface more functionality focused, easing out the usability which in all leads to a better user experience.
- Responsiveness: Flat design is the most prioritized design language in UI/UX industry to create responsive design as it is scalable and adapts easily on different screen sizes. This is its one of the main feature why we should use flat design.
- Optimizable: Flat design are mostly light weight due to which thee load much faster resulting in fast loading interfaces and are light on servers to store. This capability makes the design first choice to create mobile applications.
- Clarity and Readability: Usage of subtle color schemes complementing each other, low elements usage, clean line designs, minimalistic typography, all of this makes the content easy to understand for the user reducing user frustration.
Key Benefits of Flat Design
- Minimalistic: Flat designs are simple and clean in appearance without any unnecessary elements. They offer a clean and minimalistic visual experience. There clarity helps the user to easily understand and operate the application.
- User-Friendly: Flat designs are mostly based on the basis of user’s understanding making it easy to use and understand. Its main highlight are that it more focuses on functionality. Design and style are also main points but still comes after functionality.
- Optimized: Flat design is based on clean and simple graphics and less depth creating elements. Which make them to load faster as they have reduced sizes and take less space on servers. This is a really important aspect for mobile optimized applications and leading to better performance.
- Responsive: Flat design works well with the responsive app designs. Its flat shapes and minimalistic looks makes it easier to scale and rearrange elements for various screen sizes and orientations.
- Consistency: Flat design focuses on consistent styles making it the first choice for building a brand design. This makes the brand to be recognizable by the user whenever they see the elements.
- Accessibility: The simple style of flat design is easy to understand by wider audience, even among users with disabilities. For eg:- Low color palette usage in design may help color blind people to surf easily.
What Are The Issues with Flat Designs?
- Lack of Visual Hierarchy: Flat designs are mostly dependent on color & typography to to provide hierarchy. Without using other elements such as shadows and gradients, it becomes difficult to convey comparative importance of elements which may lead to confusion.
- Low depth visualization: As there is almost no usage of shadow it may become difficult for user to understand which item is interactive and which is non-interactive.
- Minimalist Aesthetics: Minimalism or you can say simplified look is a main feature of flat design but sometimes it may get over-simplified resulting in a non interactive feel making the user not interested in using the interface.
- Limited Realism: Flat design are more simple than real. It may be useful for most application but not for every applications. Such as gaming application that require a more realistic looking UI increasing user interactivity
- Accessibility Challenges: If the flat design is not created with the point of accessibility in mind, it can lead to difficulty in usage of interface for users with disabilities. Low contrast, insufficient labeling, can minimize accessibility.
Best Practices for Flat Design
- Prioritize Clarity and Readability: High-contrast color schemes must be used so that text and icons are easily readable. A legit typography and consistent font sizes will increase readability of user
- Maintain a Strong Visual Hierarchy: Use colors, size and placement to emphasize on interactive elements.
- Use Minimalist Color Palettes: Color should be limited to few as too many color can create confusion in users mind. Also palette should be created on the basis of color psychology, this evokes emotion inside user’s mind and may create connection of user with the interface.
- Employ Simple and Consistent Icons: Icons should be easily recognizable. Hence the design style while creating icons must be consistent with universally understandable design language.
- Optimize for Mobile and Responsive Design: Flat Design must be easily adaptable to to various screen sizes and orientations. Mobile optimization must be prioritized to increase users on smartphones and tablets.
Practices to Avoid While Creating Flat Design
- Oversimplicity: Simplicity is the main aspect of flat design but if the design becomes too simple then it will be really difficult for user to understand the meaning of the element.
- Not Enough Contrast: If the design didn’t contain adequate contrast than its readability will decrease resulting in a bad user experience. So choose minimal color palette with right color contrasts.
- White Space Overuse: Flat design ability to provide focus on specific elements is based on white spacing. But if it is overused it may disrupt the hierarchy of application making it difficult to distinguish between content and UI elements.
- Inconsistent Typography: Using too many typefaces or wrong typeface combos in the application will result in poor visual appearance and will look disorganized and unprofessional. This will result in user doubting the brand authority.
- No Visual Feedback: Flat designs have low or no interactive animations for the user to distinguish between interactive elements and static elements making the application confusing. So do add subtle animations and shadows on hover or interaction.
- Lack of Responsiveness: Flat designs basic principle is to be responsive. So remember to create elements for screen ratios and should be fluid and scalable.
- Ignoring User Feedback: User feedback is really important for improving your website. Neglecting user feedback and failing to make necessary changes based on user insights can bring down your website’s effectiveness.
Conclusion
In the end we can say that Flat design has evolved and still have a large potential in UI designing. It has significantly influenced the design philosophy in the UI/UX world. It is a design approach that values simplicity, clarity, and functionality. Flat design is timeless and a good option for creating high-end UIs for future.