[nonrecursive]

I can't help but feel like this is just the next obvious cycle in design fashion and as such it's not something to get so worked up about. "The Honest Design Age" strikes me as an absurdly grandiose term. I like the more prosaic interpretation, which is that certain graphical idioms have become so commonplace that in order to stand out visually, you need to do something different. Fashion.

In a few years, designers will start to get tired of looking at and creating flat designs day in and day out. They'll add little flourishes and write blog posts proclaiming "The Era of Living Design", where designs have all the spark and texture of real living things.

I mean, it's absolutely great that these folks are so excited, so passionate about design. But I don't think it has to be so cosmically meaningful for it to be exciting.

And this is not to say that Layer Vault is poorly designed. It's just that it can be a good design without every non-flat design being bad or dishonest.

[mnicole]

This. There's been a lot of pseudo-shitting on gradients recently, and I don't understand it. Like you said, these things aren't inherently bad or should be avoided, they're often just overdone and done poorly to begin with, much like the grunge brush era of the late 90s & early 2000s and the ushering in of what people saw as shiny, bubbly "Web 2.0" thereafter.

Trends are not indicators of best practice, and they cannot be applied to just any site at random and work as effectively as they did on another. I love LayerVault and think Allan Grinshtein is a great designer, but this post was a little too much for me.

[AhtiK]

What is pseudo-shitting on gradients? Monochromatic noise?

[mnicole]

Ha ;) I was referring to people that have made it a point to jump on the bandwagon and make Dribbble shots or similar blog posts referring to practicing/utilizing this "technique".

[winteriscomming]

I agree. Visual design is like fashion and flatter is now "in". There are pros (cleaner, less distracting chrome) and cons (where is the button).

[marcusf]

Isn't this what denotes an era or school of design/architecture/art though, like realism, romanticism, bauhaus, modernism, industrialism, etc? Changes in the approach and visual style.

In a sense, this is creating a language to talk about UX in the same way we talk about architecture. No doubt it's a bit grandiose, but it works.

[batista]

>Isn't this what denotes an era or school of design/architecture/art though, like realism, romanticism, bauhaus, modernism, industrialism, etc? Changes in the approach and visual style.

Yes, only those were major art movements, this "flat" thing is this month's design fad...

[kirklove]

You nailed it. 100%. Perfect comment.