[criley2]

I'm not sure I agree that flat design removed the technical barrier to entry. First off, not everything is flat. Second, and I think this is really important, the ability to deliver a beautiful design system and the ability to use a design system to create a nice UX are two fundamentally different skills. The artist that delivers the most beautiful gradient (which apparently using the gradient setting in photoshop is a Big Scary Skill™ that flat design solved) often is not an expert at how best to deliver iOS UI.

And your resident mobile designer who knows everything about iOS and Android probably isn't the best at rolling brand new design systems with or without really pretty gradients.

Because these are two different skills, I don't think the style of the design system really impacts the barrier of entry. Most UI designers aren't fiddling with the finer details like that. They're composing already defined "atoms" into the "molecules" of components and pages.

[robenkleene]

I think your mainly indexing on the word I used "technical", because yes I agree I'd also categorize creating a design system as "technical". But it's technical in a different way than say, creating a glass material in a 3D modeling program, or simulating 3D effects in a 2D image-editing program. So I mean the way the latter is technical, not the former, if there's a better word than technical to use here, I'm all ears (maybe "skilled"?).

The key difference in the specific context of Figma is that a layman without any technical skills can give pretty good feedback on a design system, but say, wouldn't be able to give good feedback on how a 3D modeling material is constructed.

> which apparently using the gradient setting in photoshop is a Big Scary Skill™ that flat design solved

This isn't what I mean, I meant combining layers to create 3D effects like this https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/kj9yut/guide_to... i.e., creating the gradient itself isn't complicated, it's composing layers to achieve a specific effect that's complicated (and "technical").

[robenkleene]

I guess I didn't really address the split in roles you mentioned which is accurate, but I think flat design is what facilitated (and makes possible) that split.

E.g., you couldn't do this with the type of design I was doing in the 2000s, because the assets we were making didn't scale and recontexualize as easily as flat design elements. I.e., I think flat design not only paved the way for Figma, but also design systems in general.

> They're composing already defined "atoms" into the "molecules" of components and pages.