| Philosophically or practically: What's the justification for nearly everyone switching to flat design? Is there any articulable reason it's "better" than the rich, three-dimensional style[1] that was previously popular? Or is it just an arbitrary trend? Some say the change is driven by high-DPI displays. I disagree. I don't see any intrinsic reason that flat designs look better than rich, three-dimensional designs on a high-DPI display. Without a doubt, flat can look nice, but so can things like this: http://www.sequelpro.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/seq... Another justification I've heard is that it's a reaction to the excesses of the previous trend. People often point to the leather motif in certain Apple applications as an example of such excess. But first of all, those examples are outliers; few designs actually went that far. Second, the existence of a questionable use of a given style is not an effective argument against that style in general. Third, "some things were extremely 3d, so now we'll be extremely flat" seems like contrarianism for contrarianism's sake. [1] Some call this skeuomorphism. I tend not to, because the term technically means something narrower than what we're talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph |
Flat design is good as long as there are no important visual cues lost what elements can be interacted with and which are just passively displaying information. I really do still have problems in iOS7 to separate passive text elements from interactive text elements (formerly called "buttons"). Examples are the contacts list or the famous shift-button of the onscreen keyboard.
Thankfully in OSX 10.10, buttons are still recognizable as buttons, and I like that less radical flatness much more then iOS7. Although, in the current state the UI looks a lot like a Gnome skin which tries to mimic OSX though, I hope that improves until release.