[currywurst]

It's time for the pendulum to swing back I guess ;)

The article give iOS 7 the credit for ushering in the 'flat' design trends ... But I remember the Windows Phone 7-8 'Metro' (later renamed to Modern) design language as the key influence. It blew away people with the attention to typography and proportional grid-based layouts.

[ahartmetz]

It was Metro, and before that websites that got rid of divider lines and frames, signifying borders between areas by empty space.

I actually mostly like that trend and only think it goes overboard when you don't know what you can or cannot interact with anymore.

[torgoguys]

I think you're right. But, in a reversal of roles, Microsoft did the design well and Apple's copy was a poor, souless wannabe IMO. They sucked any semblance of "joy" (for lack of a better word) out of the Metro ideas and iOS.

[lowtolerance]

I disagree. Microsoft just took typographic design principles that have been extant for decades and which were already commonplace in print and web design and applied them wholesale to UI design.

There are situations where this makes perfect sense, but it was hardly a sensible approach to UI design on the whole. Metro was widely criticized for making it more difficult for users to be productive, which I would argue is the primary concern of any desktop operating system. And indeed, Microsoft quickly moved beyond Metro in favor of Fluent, a design language that is much more in keeping with Apple’s current design language than it is with Metro.

Metro, despite being relatively popular with UI designers and developers, totally flopped with users, who did not find joy in using it at all. With Metro, Microsoft attempted to cut out UI chrome in favor of content. The idea being that removing chrome would make room for content. Instead, they ended up treating content as chrome, leaving substantially less room for actual content. Microsoft failed to meet their own design goals for Metro. And what’s worst, they seemingly failed to recognize that they had failed for quite some time.

Apple’s human interface design guidelines for iOS, while far from perfect, are a much truer realization of the design principles that Microsoft set out to implement with Metro. Rather than treating content as chrome, chrome is reduced to its most basic elements, retaining its ability to inform the user as to its function, while minimally detracting from content.

[wmeredith]

Yes, design is fashion after all. It’s cyclical.

[omer_balyali]

Design is not fashion, fashion is fashion. Otherwise, every market and product/service segment has its own "fashion", but that doesn't make them "is fashion". (Startups are fashion, engineering is fashion, education is fashion, technology is fashion etc.)