Design Evolution: Today's Flat Designs
Design evolves backwards: 50's minimalism gets to the digital screen.
Flat Design as a general concept and branded detailed versions, like Microsoft's metro and google's material design, kicked skeuomorphism's details and introduced simplified shapes with pure backgrounds and high contrasted colours. No more tiny details, no more million colours per square inch. Why?
Screen sizes vary, so the best, smart way to scale objects is by using basic shapes.
- Users became more accustomed to touch screens and apps; metaphors were not so badly needed anymore. Millennials (born surrounded by digital screens) and "mature" users demanded a new look, away from the 2000's nostalgia.
- Internet users (mainly through social media) flooded screens with video, animations and photographs; as a consequence, surrounding elements like a save icon or the app's logo should then remain as non-invasive as possible.
- Few colours and details meant more battery (and bandwidth) available for real content.
- Flat style meant less work for designers, who could then focus on covers, memes, and other content-related graphic elements.
Flat Logo Designs
Logo design was disrupted as well. Computers arrived at printers' workshops improving speed, reducing costs and granting designers freedom to experiment via trial/error.
Businesses jumped into social media and online content generation; their logos did as well. Trends like flat design, mostly associated with icon design in the early 2000's, blended with logo design in more recent years.
Logos now appear in ads that last only a few seconds. They show up in videos that last 15'' or 30'' (like those in Vine, Instagram and youtube). In order to get fixated faster onto our minds, shapes must be plain as they can.
Logos need to work in big displays, little displays, printed ads, animations, shirts, cards, onto hundreds of backgrounds. When a designer adds elements like borders and shades, those elements remain somehow attached to the specific colours and dimensions chosen; if the designer changes the background, then those element will also require specific changes. But logos are about identity, and they should feel the same no matter the circumstance; that is why minimalism works, because it sticks to the primal visual concept.