Flat design, neumorphism and the future
How Apple fell flat and discovered depth again
The 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 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.
Grey area
Colour matters. We’ve long understood that menu items shown in a mid-grey colour are not currently available, so when Apple made some icons grey – as it did with the iOS Share Sheet’s copy, slideshow and other icons while keeping app icons in fuller colour – that indicated that those icons weren’t available, when in fact they were. That’s another one that’s since been fixed.
Google took a slightly different approach. Rather than go for flat design, it went for what it calls Material Design; a similarly flat approach, but one that doesn’t rule out shadows, patterns and animations to help with clarity and make the interface feel more responsive. Apple uses gradients where Google prefers solid colours; Apple uses blurring while Google prefers drop shadows.
It looks like Apple is moving away from flat design in favour of neumorphism
Microsoft has its taken own approach too. Microsoft Design Language (MDL), as used in Windows Phone and the Xbox 360, has evolved into what Microsoft calls Fluent Design. This is another very flat, very minimalist interface that you can see in Windows 10 and Windows 11, and it has a similar feel to Google’s Material Design.
It looks like Apple is already moving away from flat design in favour of neuomorphism, which is very evident in the difference between the icons in macOS Catalina and the ones in Big Sur or Monterey, and in the Control Centre pop-out from the menu bar. The familiar flat icons now have consistent lighting and shadows to make them look 3D, and they also use a consistent shape; gone are the tilted icons of Catalina for apps such as Preview or Reminders. Meanwhile circles have become ‘squircles’ – that is, squares with rounded edges, just like in the latest iOS, iPadOS and tvOS.
As personal computing moves from your desk to your wrist or your head, its interface won’t be like your Mac or iPhone. Your Apple Watch’s interface is very different from those devices, and your Apple augmented reality (AR) headset will be even more dramatically different. Does an Apple AR device – or a Facebook VR or a Microsoft Mixed Reality one – mean interacting with the kind of interface you’ve only seen in Iron Man, Minority Report or in the case of Facebook’s Metaverse, VRML websites from 1997?
The short answer is: probably not. Simplicity is the key here. To take a real-world AR example, a reversing camera that overlays parking directions or the heads-up display in a car is an AR device; if it more than simply shows the right info in the right place at the right time it’s overdesigned. As a rule of thumb, if it’s a whizzy AR/VR interface that looks good on a movie screen it’ll most likely give you sore arms and a crushing headache in real life.
Apple has published lots of guidance about AR interfaces, and its guidelines are all about making the experience as clean and as simple as possible: interacting in AR/VR should be as easy and as obvious as it would be with real-world objects.
To paraphrase Steve Jobs, a successful augmented, mixed or virtual reality interface is one that just works.