Sacha Greif talks about the dangers of the new flat design aesthetic in The Flat Sink:
Just like the flat sink, this new flat aesthetic looks great and feels refreshing after the unnecessary flourishes of recent years. But it can also be taken too far.
Remove all affordances, and you make it harder for the user to know where to click.
Put everything on the same plane, and you make it harder to focus on a specific section of the page.
It’s a good reminder that a particular aesthetic should always be used because it fits the purpose of the site/application, not because it’s the latest cool thing to do. Besides — even skeuomorphism is ok when it’s used in good taste1.
-
I wanted to link to Ben Bleikamp’s original post, but it seems to have disappeared from the Internet, so my pull quote will have to do. ↩