In the latest weeks our designer got to observe and study a new design style which, since a couple months, is becoming more and more popular among web and mobile designers, as tons of posts on Dribbble and Behance shows. People is talking about it on Medium too.
We are talking about neumorphism, the design style that looks for a return to the past, forgetting the flat style that characterized the latest years UI design trends, but leaving aside even all the colors that were present in the skeumorphic style, years ago.
How neumorphism is born
Neumorphism birth is on a Dribbble post, by Alexander Plyuto, who designs an home banking application.
“ Let’s imagine that we live in a dimension where skeuomorph is still alive and continued its evolution in mobile interfaces. What would applications look like then? Here is my vision.”
The concept takes a lot of skeumorphic elements, but using few colors and a lot of white in the background. White is also present on every tridimensional elements, in addition to a lot of lights and shadows, that make these elements visible and nice.
Also, as you can see, Plyuto does not talk about neumorphism, referring to his design as “skeumorphism which kept evolving since 2013”.
Where does the name neumorphism come from, then?
In this paper Michal Malewicz, designer and editor for UX Collective, in November, asked himself what would have been the next user interface design trend. The answer, after a small journey through the latest years trends, from flat to Material Design, is for him a new style that keeps some skeumorphic elements, which Malewicz calls “New Skeuomorphism”. A user called Jason Kalley suggests in the comments a new name which is the combination of new and skeumorphism: neumorphism.
Neumorphism everywhere
In the following weeks, it’s an explosion of neumorphism. The style (and the name) begin to catch on Dribbble, Behance, Instagram.
People talks about it on Medium, but not only: a lot of posts says that neumorphism, which until then was alive only on popular design websites, could really become the next big design trend for mobile and web.
The use of a style that could recall the neumorphic one by some brands, such as Apple or Samsung, reinforces this hypothesis which at the moment has no confirmation. Some even speculate that the next version of Apple’s operating system, iOS 14, may have a neumorphic style.
Neumorphism and accessibility
People talks about it on Medium too: the first tutorials and the first posts on some designers’ attempts to create something using neumorphism start appearing.
But are also beginning the first critical articles about it: neumorphism has serious accessibility problems and in some cases, perhaps too many, it is not clear enough.
For example, buttons and cards, apart from the dimensions, can be completely identical in style, so how to recognize them?
And going back to accessibility, the fact that the elements are the same color as the background creates problems for many people with visual disabilities, who for example may not recognize a button.
The play of light and shadow, which is so popular, may perhaps be enough to create an attractive user interface, but unfortunately it is not enough to create a functional one.
Will it take hold?
It is a question that many are asking. Obviously we cannot know. Many think yes, but it must be said that there are many designs around, but very few products that can be used, that can be touched by hand.
Searching for example “neumorphism” on the App Store and Play Store will give use only two results in the Apple store, and none in the Play Store. The two apps in the App Store actually respect the neumorphic style, but they are both very simple and look like a tests more than anything else (especially this one, although it is paid: shall we talk about the colors used?)
Even on the web there is still very little around: apart from this site, which generates CSS code to create a neumorphic style, nothing can be seen on the horizon.
So for the moment, neumorphism is mainly concentrated in design.
Conclusions
In short, it seems that there is still some way to go before seeing neumorphism appear in our everyday life.
Here at Mabiloft we think that the serious accessibility problem makes neumorphism uncapable of adapting itself to be used on apps and websites that must be used daily and be accessible. At the moment it’s still a trend, only good for Dribbble designs. It can be used for apps, but with many attention.
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