Purpose Trumps Polish

The following is a response to the article “Fall of the Designer Part I: Fashionable Nonsense”, by Eli Schiff.

Besides the fact that I really, really don’t agree with the connotation that “flat” design is plain worse than “skeuomorphic” design, I feel like the article makes an unfair point. It equates the work of app/product/interaction designers simply to visual design, in the sense that it only aims to be fashionable.

Instead of fashionable paint jobs, interaction designers create systems. The interface itself is solely a manifestation of said system. As such the quality of the work should never be judged on purely aesthetic merits. The fact that most visual design nowadays looks (and behaves) very similar stems from the systems behind it. Our whole technological ecosystem is homogenous.

Schiff slams Duarte for admitting to a fashion in visual design when the point he is actually trying to make is the fact that the products and systems behind it are still generic.

If you compare the diversity in software to something like the diversity in clothing, it’s orders of magnitude different.

That doesn’t mean that it is up to visual design to create variance on our screens. Variance in fashion doesn’t stem from the wish to create something that is visually different. Instead, fashion is informed — like many other arts — by values, society, politics and social commentary. None of that should hold any importance in interactive design and to compare the two is simply not fair.

Our process should be guided by the structure and essence of the system we are designing for. The purpose of visual design for apps is not artistic expression, but rather to provide a means of communication between the user and the system. As much as it helps stroke our egos to tell ourselves, we are not artists, not storytellers, but communicators.

The reason that flat design has become so ubiquitous is because our relation to technology is vastly different now than it was when Aqua was announced in 2001 (or even iOS in 2007). Because we have become so involved with technology, our need to associate its purpose to everyday items has faded. Instead, technology itself has become its own entity with its own aesthetic of which the lack of tangible surfaces is simply a reflection.

Flat design is a natural evolution driven by our technological advancement, not a last-ditch effort of mediocre designers to validate their skills. Bad design has always existed and will persist, because it is nurtured by a lack of understanding of our craft and its purpose.