Your eyes were designed to explore a rich and physical world. But you’re looking at a screen right now. In fact, you probably spend a lot of your day looking at a screen.
Bottom line: what’s on this screen matters.
Ever stare out at a beautiful natural landscape and feel charged with energy just looking at it? As an engineer, I’ve marveled at the incredible amount of information the real world contains. And somehow, unlike your messy room, all this visual information is in harmony. It’s food for not just the eyes, but the soul.
Virtual and Proud
Flat design hails from the print world, and it’s now making significant in-roads into interactive apps. This trendy methodology kicks real world metaphors and rich 3D visuals to the curb. The argument is that these artifacts of the real world tie us to the past, and hold us back from what could be.
Flat designs are virtual and proud of it, with a heavy emphasis on text, bold colors, and solid backgrounds. Are they our future? Is the goal to totally abstract ourselves from physical reality?
Keep It Real
We are physical creatures, and we are made to interact with physical things. The more time we spend on screens, the more disconnected we can feel from the physical world around us.
The best solution is to unplug. Put down the phone, step away from the computer, and be a part of the real world. But that’s not the direction our world is spinning right now.
We’re spending more time with our screens, not less. Our touchscreen devices are becoming the interface for… everything. The question becomes, how do we stay grounded in physical reality – while we’re interacting with a virtual one?
Retina to the Rescue
Our devices should not separate us from our world. They should connect us more deeply with it.
We have an amazing technology that can help us with this. It’s called a Retina display, with pixels so tightly packed and colors so brilliant, that it offers the closest approximation of reality we’ve ever had.
So why waste it?
In photo and video apps, we can maximize the benefit of these pixels from the real world, and fill as much of the screen as we can with them.
In apps without visuals, we have an opportunity to add them. I’m not talking about cartoon leather or green felt or dark linen. They were problematic choices that pushed the pendulum to swing too far in the other direction. And they were obviously fake.
To satisfy our craving for reality, we need visuals that look real.
Flat vs. Skeumorphic?
Flat design and skeuomorphism are not goals. They are tools. Whether they are appropriate depends on the situation.
The real question is: did you make the best use of your pixels? Did you bring the user closer to their world and connect with them emotionally, or did you put a monochrome wall in their way?
Flat designs can work brilliantly when used with images from the real world. Skeuomorphism, the use of satisfying physical metaphors, can provide visual relief from an otherwise mundane experience. It can create joy where there would otherwise be boredom.
