Website Design: What is Flat Design? Where does flat design come from?

If you go to inquire these days Web Design You can probably hear the concept of flat design every time. The rise of the concept of flat design is actually a matter of recent years, but because some large companies and organizations tend to favor it in web design, flat design has gained great popularity.

But few people know where the concept of flat design comes from? Why is this concept used in web design? For a new design concept, it is important to understand the historical background of a style and a technology, because when we think about whether to adopt this new design concept, understanding its origin can help us make a more intelligent decision. So we need to take a look at the history of flat design.

What on earth is flat design?

For those who have never heard of it, we can simply explain that the so-called flattening design is to remove all the styles and attributes with three-dimensional prominent effects during the design process. In other words, drop shadows, gradient changes, surface texture differences, and all design effects with three-dimensional effects are removed.

Flattened design is favored by the designers of marketing website construction today, because this style can make the design more modern, and can also strongly highlight the most important content in the design: content and information. In fact, those attributes with three-dimensional effects are all popular styles for a period of time, so removing these information will make your design less likely to become outdated. What's more, it can highlight the content itself. So this design style has many advantages.

In fact, if we want to discuss the flat design, we must mention its opposite, that is rich design rich design style. The so-called rich design is to enrich the overall design by adding various design decorations, such as falling shadows, gradients, etc. This design style allows users to navigate the web more freely. In addition, the style of rich design is different from that of virtual design. The latter makes the design more realistic by simulating physical objects.

The emergence of flat design in the IT field

Although many designers are now using the flat style for web design, it can be said that without the promotion of Microsoft and Apple, the flat design would not be as popular as it is now.

First, Microsoft and its Metro Design. In order to compete with Apple's iPod player, Microsoft launched the Zune music player in 2006, and since then it has started a design style called Metro. This style highlights large font text and matches with background pictures. This style is very different from the traditional Windows style of Microsoft at that time. The Windows Phone 7 system launched in 2010 has actually accumulated a lot of experience from Zune's design. As a result, the name of Metro was spread. It was so popular that Microsoft also applied it to the later Windows 8. In addition, this design style is also used in other software, such as Xbox 360, etc.

In addition, of course, there is Apple and its virtual style. When Microsoft prepared its own design style, Apple had made changes. They gave up the virtual style and directly adopted the flat design. It launched iOS7 in the summer of 2013. Because there are many products involved, it quickly became popular. Apple has a great influence on the design field. Designers quickly like this flat style, which can make their products more modern.

Where does flat design come from?

In fact, many styles of web design can be found in printed works of art. However, it is difficult to identify the original source of flat design. It should be said that from a number of design styles and periods, we have received corresponding inspiration and finally formed the flattening design, such as the following:

Swiss Style

Swiss Style is the most worth discussing in the history of flat design. This design style rose in Switzerland and lasted from 1940s to 1950s. The Swiss Style style is characterized by the massive use of grid design elements. In addition, the content and layout are very simple. In that era, you can often see a large photo with simple words. This is a typical Swiss Style design. In fact, like the flat style, Swiss Style has appeared for some time before it became popular on a large scale. It can almost be traced back to Germany in the 1920s, but then it became very popular in Switzerland.

Minimalism Design

In addition, Minimalism Design, in fact, is basically the same name for flat design. Some people also mix them, but it appeared much earlier and has been used in architectural and visual design before. Minimalism Design is characterized by removing all useless things and leaving only the necessary elements, usually several geometric shapes and some bright colors. So basically these two design styles affect the formation of flat design.

The future of flat design

No one has a crystal ball that can predict the future, so we can almost say that the flat design will eventually disappear and be replaced by other design styles. But designers will continue to plan and try, and eventually evolve it to a new style. In fact, Google is now trying to make full use of their respective characteristics by combining it with the traditional rich design. In short, the design industry is always changing.