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Interviewer:
Do you make a distinction between “flat” and “round” characters?
Hemingway:
If you describe someone, it is flat, as a photograph is, and from my standpoint a failure. If you make him up from what you know, there should be all the dimensions.
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This is why this conversation goes on, why it is worth having. The desire for more honest (or at least more interesting) interfaces and a certain aesthetic have been lumped together and called “flat design”. I’m concerned with the deeper drive for mor pure interaction design, and there is more to it than altering your style or changing your habits in Photoshop. There is a fundamentally different process, something genuinely unique from print design. That difference goes much deeper than tools, and even defies directly translatable principles. “What’s good for print is good for digital” doesn’t hold up as a mantra of ‘flat’ design.
Much of skeuomorphism is about transcribing the physicality of real world interfaces into flat interfaces. It’s a pretty banal process to search for the real world analog to the idea of toggling a setting, or amplifying volume, and then assigning to that a flattened representation of a three dimensional interface. It is description, it is flat, as a photograph is, and it is a failure.
Flat design is the opposite of flat. This honest / native / natural / essential / lean / minimal / truemorphic design wipes the paradigm clean from banal visual descriptions. It’s is not limited by what you can describe to the user about the interface and experience with photographic accuracy. It is made up, from everything you know, about how people behave and flow and interact, and most of what you know is left unsaid, unrepresented, untranslated, and undescribed. Description is flat. Hemingway left almost everything out, and rather than describe a scene, he tells a story, just as we tell experiences. In making it up, “there should be all the dimensions.”
Flat design is not flat. Screens are flat. The interfaces within them are dynamic. They have real depth — depth through time, depth of experience, depth of emotion. Faux spatial depth is the least interesting possibility of a digital, multi-touch interface design. Don’t translate interfaces. Make them up, with all their depth and dimension.
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Thought about this a bit more and had some thoughts on the aesthetics of flat design.
I wonder if the aesthetic of flat design is just a signal to the user that this is something different. Rather than the digital format informing only the design process, it is also a desire for it to directly inform the use as well. It’s disorientation so that the user might be reoriented. It is a way for the designer to speak through the interface and say:
“This is not a dashboard, a keyboard, a console. It is not a toggle, a button, a switch, a handle. This is not mechanical.But it is interactive — moveable and mutable. It’s some of what those other, physical things are, but not entirely, and in some ways less, in many ways more.”
As an aesthetic, flat design’s purpose is to signal to the user as they walk in the door that things are different here. What I see in these “flat” designs is a deliberate effort to pull users along rather than wait for them to get there on their own. Can users grasp something new without the crutch of metaphor? Will they naturally develop new understanding and behavior, or do we need to move them forward?
Metaphor is not inherently bad. It’s a teaching tool. It’s great for transition. But forever burdening the digital format with physical metaphors is like putting a Shelby Cobra V8 engine in Fred Flintstone’s car and telling him to still push along with his feet.
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