FEATURE Interface design
Flat design, neumorphism and the future
How Apple fell flat and discovered depth again
There lease of iOS 7 signalled the beginning of Apple’s era of flat design. As the name suggests, flat design is about removing unnecessary visual frippery; it makes everything look as if it’s laid flat on the same surface. That simplicity can be attractive, but if you can simplify things too much and end up with icons and other interface elements where it’s not clear what’s going on. A good example of that is the ‘hamburger’ menu you see on a lot of websites, which is three horizontal lines on top of each other; there’s no obvious visual indication of what that icon does, and we only know what it is because we’ve seen it so many times before.
The other issue with flat design is that it’s not always obvious where you’re supposed to tap or click, especially if – like Apple did in iOS 7 – you deliberately adopt a very minimalist colour palette too. The iOS 7 Control Centre was a good example of that; with a translucent white background and very thin icons and controls in either dark grey or white depending on their status it was hard to read or to see statuses at a glance. Thankfully Apple fixed that by adding colour in iOS 9 and different shadings in iOS 10.