The Flatness Doctrine

The declaration of flatness

In 2012, Microsoft shipped Windows 8 with an interface called Metro — all flat colour, sharp edges, large typography. A year later, Apple shipped iOS 7, stripping years of texture and shadow from its mobile interface. These were not simultaneous accidents. They were the design industry arriving at the same conclusion from different directions: depth was wrong.

The argument against depth was coherent. Skeuomorphic design had become, by 2012, an embarrassment — a design language that had outlasted its usefulness, that was using visual complexity to simulate physical materials in ways that no longer helped anyone understand anything. The green felt of the Game Center. The leather binding of the Calendar app. These were metaphors that had stopped working.

What flatness argued

Flat design argued for honesty. The screen is flat; the interface should look flat. The digital is not the physical; the interface should not pretend it is. This is a modernist argument — the same argument that stripped ornament from architecture, that removed representational content from abstract painting. The medium should be legible as itself.

There was also a practical argument: flat design is faster to render, easier to maintain, more flexible across screen sizes. In the age of mobile, an interface that did not depend on pixel-level shadow rendering was an interface that could scale. The aesthetic argument and the technical argument pointed in the same direction.

The problem of sameness

By 2016, flat design had created a visual monoculture. Every app looked like every other app. The design system had won — which meant that the design system had become invisible, which meant that it had become boring. The interfaces that were supposed to be honest had become dishonest in a new way: they pretended that there was no visual decision being made at all.

The industry's response has been slow and not particularly self-aware. Gradients returned as "rich colour." Shadows returned as "elevation." Texture returned as "material." Each of these was flat design adding back what it had removed, without acknowledging that it was doing so.

What comes after flat

The design language that will succeed flatness will be harder to name as a single doctrine. It is already visible in the corners: the return of expressive typography as primary visual tool; the use of film grain and noise as textural elements that do not pretend to be physical; the interest in interfaces that have visible rules — grid systems, spacing scales — rather than invisible ones.

This is not a return to skeuomorphism. The lessons of flat design are absorbed; they cannot be unlearned. But the desire for specificity — for interfaces that are identifiably from a particular moment, made by a particular sensibility — is strong enough that the monoculture will not hold.