Flat design is everywhere. Just look at any from your phone’s app icons to online banking dashboards and you will see that digital design has gone on a radical diet. The glossy buttons are done away with, as are the icons that look like real-world objects. In their place there are bold colours, simple shapes and stripped-down geometry.

The movement towards flatness was initially a style preference, but it has gone beyond that now. It marks a deeper shift in how designers think about function and clarity through efficiency.

This article explores the origin of flat design, where minimalism replaced realism, why it became so pervasive on the modern web, to the point of becoming the default visual language.

Flat Design

Flat design is a minimalist approach to user interface design that removes all unnecessary stylistic elements, such as shadows, gradients, textures and three-dimensional effects, in favour of simplicity and usability.

Flat design focuses on:

·       Solid colours

·       Neat edges

·       Simple, geometric shapes

·       Minimal ornamentation

·       Legible typography.

Each icon in flat design is reduced to its essential function:

“This is a button”

Rather than:

“This is a simulated plastic button that looks like it belongs on a remote control.”

The Rise of Flat

Flat design emerged as a direct reaction to the skeuomorphic interfaces of the early 2000s. Then, designers used real-world textures and metaphors to make digital environments feel familiar, such as paper notebooks, filing cabinets or wooden bookshelves.

As users became more and more digitally fluent, those metaphors started to feel ornamental and clunky. There was an appetite for change by the late 2000s.

Microsoft’s Metro UI in 2010 was one of the first major systems to embrace flatness fully. It features block colours, big bold text and simple iconography.

In 2013, Apple dropped skeuomorphism with iOS 7. By doing this, the company sent out a strong signal: flat design had moved on from being a mere aesthetic to a new standard. Leather stitching and 3D icons were a thing of the past. In came neon gradients, geometry and thin lines.

In 2014, Google’s Material Design offered a hybrid between flat and skeuomorphic design. It had flat elements with subtle depth and motion. But then it introduced elevation and hierarchy. This would lay the foundation for what would later become known as Flat 2.0.

What is So Appealing about Flat Design?

·       Clarity and Simplicity: Flat design removes distractions. There are no embellishments to mislead or confuse the user, just essential elements presented clearly.

·       Responsive and Scalable: Flat elements resize well. They are perfect for mobile and responsive design, where layout flexibility is key.

·       Performance: Fewer graphic assets and visual effects mean faster loading, smoother performance and better compatibility across devices and systems.

·       Focus on Function: By removing metaphor and decoration, flat design brings usability to the foreground. It asks the user to do and not to admire.

·       Clean and Modern Aesthetic: Flat design came to symbolise modernity, professionalism and digital maturity, especially in medtech, fintech and productivity tools.

Examples of Flat versus Skeuomorphic

These examples show how skeuomorphic icons aimed to look like real things, while flat icons aim to be symbols: clean and quick to read. In essence, skeuomorphic design attempts to recreate reality, while flat design simplifies it.

Where Flat Design Works Best

Flat design is highly effective in utility-driven contexts where clarity and speed or more important than emotional tone. Examples include:

·       Admin dashboards

·       Data visualisation tools

·       Email and productivity apps

·       Tech landing pages

·       Developer platforms.

When users are task-focused and already familiar with digital systems, flat design supports fast, frictionless interaction.

Is Flat Design Always the Right Choice?

Flat design is ideal in many cases, but it is not always the best option, especially where:

·        Users need emotional reassurances, such as with health apps, diaries, electronic Clinical Outcome Assessments.

·       Visuals must convey complex meanings, such as in medical instructions or visuals to convey warnings or symptoms.

·       Users may lack digital fluency.

Sometimes, something is lost when icons go flat. When realism and metaphor are stripped away, trust, emotional warmth and intuitiveness is also lost.

Flat Design Changed the Internet

Flat design transformed digital visual language. It made interfaces fast, more scalable and visually consistent. It helped clean up cluttered systems and pushed design into a modern, mobile-friendly era.

But as the flat aesthetic became dominant, new limitations emerged. Icons became less intuitive. Interfaces lost their visual depth. And in some contexts, flatness felt cold, even unwelcoming.

The next article looks at what users lose when icons go flat and why what started out as a response to visual excess may have gone too far in the other direction.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Sunderland, United Kingdom, June 2025