a well-researched article with many salient points about the state and direction of ui visual design. this is sure to be disregarded and flamed to all hell.

I really like this guy's blog posts but he sure complains a lot.

As I posted on Twitter (that you will probably screen cap and complain about rather than address).

"Flat design is easy & bad"

No, flat design (design that doesn't rely on Skeuomorph) is hard and bad design is bad.

There is nowhere to hide when you remove the decoration.

I think this article brings up a lot of good points, and I'm glad we have people like Eli in the community to raise these issues and discuss them openly. However, this piece by itself seems to just be complaining about flat design (props for incriminating all the major players like Apple, Google, etc. and not just one) without giving a reason for why it should change or what issues arise with it. So what if Google's products don't have a wide range of design? The point of Material is to have a unified experience across all of their products. First you must pick which one you want: variance in design or uniformity in design? You can't have both at once.

Maybe this article will make more sense once the other parts are released. We'll see. I've enjoyed your work so far, Eli.

Did anyone else notice that he didn't use Facebook's real app icon for the iOS 7 icon comparison? He switched it out for the Facebook Groups app icon. The Instagram one was also wrong. The app icon Instagram currently uses looks very similar to the "before" example.

Really interesting article, I've been hearing designers talking about this a lot recently, but I do wonder if the non designers in the world (most people) actually care that digital interfaces have become more similar or if they perhaps see it as a good thing?

Although I believe that good visual design is worth investing in, I also think that individuality is sometimes over valued amongst some designer types.

Ahh, yeah. This is the good stuff. So glad you brought this to our attention, Eli. I've been concerned about the commoditization of design since all we're doing right now is rehashing stuff. And since developers pretty much have the seat, pure visual design is withering. It also explains the really low barrier-to-entry that design has now. Funny how that old adage of "someone's nephew who knows Photoshop is designing the website" has come to dangerous fruition.

As a young designer and design student, this is the kind of stuff I'm concerned about and I hope there'll be more general discussions about this moving forward.

I agreed with much of this article, until right at the end:

All that is currently permitted in visual design is the most purposeless fashionable vacuity.

I realise this probably wasn’t intended literally. Even so, I still don’t think it’s a very good characterisation of the problem today. How often are we truly restricted to designing our UIs and graphics in only this one specific style?

Yes, if you’re building something for a client then you need to meet their requirements. However, no client has ever told me they want a bland design with no brand distinctiveness, objectively poor usability, and an expected lifetime measured in months before it looks horribly dated.

And yes, if you’re limited to selling via someone’s app store and they won’t take your stuff if you don’t play by their rules, you’re stuck with a choice of following their rules or doing something else. There’s a moral about closed ecosystems in this story, but it’s a whole different post.

But otherwise, who really propagates the current flat-white trend? As far as I can see, it’s basically just big companies that have shown very little creativity for years, and “designers” whose priority is a style they can reliably implement quickly and cheaply using nothing but CSS or a native UI toolkit. In most cases, there is no good reason for anyone else to lower themselves to the same standards.