Flat design, neumorphism, and the future
How Apple fell flat and discovered depth again
T he release 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, then you 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 appears as 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.