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From past decades, web designers and the website design companies have placed specific focus over revealing their design portfolios and skills from packing websites with animations and flashy illustration in order to allegedly inspire and attract their visitors. Then after some time, the shift was made towards skeuomorphic design, this is basically an idea to bring up “real life to screen” with the use of drop shadows, real object characteristics, and faux-realistic textures. The blend of exotic typography and bright colors has covered the overall method for unique and creative flat interfaces. The role of minimalism is considered to play a major part in designing this concept, and anyone today can see how famous these latest trends are in modern time.
Flat website design can be considered as one brilliant idea as it mainly emphases on the content. However, various designers are not familiar with the modern and current trends and from where they must start their work from.
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As a learner, it is important to note that flat website design is developing maturity with the passage of time within the industry. It leads to removes various complicated patterns, bubbles, textures, shadows and other effects to emphases more on simplicity. Still, the input fields look editable and flat buttons appear to be clickable. Generally, the flat website looks interactive, however without the divinely polished graphics. Flat design is introduced recently, however, it has picked up recently from Microsoft mobile display, and currently by Microsoft Windows 8. Another “Metro design” is taking place as a trendsetter that is pushing the flat layout further. Both mobile interfaces and web have observed uptick for popular new user interfaces. Along with responsive websites distorting the difference among mobile devices and desktop, flat UI has reduced the gap for simplicity along with maintaining cultural class as well.
As a learner, you must note that flat design web works against all “artificial” design approaches and techniques, and support more classical and simplified digital aesthetic. It is vital to consider that you must not imagine making use of flat design in each and every project. Like every design trends, layouts of the flat website must not be used completely when details are composed together. If not, it might feel shaking to force a simple method under complicated website design. However when carefully placed all together, it is found that “flat users” are simple, excellent and naturally alluring that they fascinate the visitors for a longer time period.
However, one major issue that a learner might face while designing and creating a flat website are its interactive aspects and elements. It is important for the visitors to note from which section of the page have static content, whereas other areas of the website are drag-gable and clickable and whatever. The flat design may still use edge effects and light shadows for implying this interactivity. However, delicacy is the name of the game and you might not witness cases among various other flat website designs.
Helpful Designer Guides
There are few online articles that are helping and guiding new learners to work, it is also necessary to share various particular resources in order to guide with the concept of flat design. As under “Medium Blog post referencing flat design & UI problems”, the writer Missy Titus explains that flat UI must help in solving the overall problem and in fact making them easier to explore. From shedding away stitching and textures along with box shadows, the designers should not remove any essential content from the website page. The design pattern and trends are considered to be assured look. Obviously, the flat design cannot be considered for every website. There are several website styles and they are considered to be famous for any specific reason such as variety. Carefully-crafted flat 2-D interfaces stand out as they look simple to practice. Along with this, it engages the visitors to focus on the overall content as compared with anything else. The principle of flat design will guide in understanding existing interface structures.
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Most important, the web creator must give attention to “content hierarchy” inside the page. Factors do not generally interconnect each other and the page needs to glow naturally. This involves switching among box content and colors. It is quite easy to consider that page is being created within typography, and all these several text boxes will update the user how to get interacted with the each page. In some, buttons might be used with pictograms and shapes, and for some, it may use flat background color scheme. The color schemes and web page texts are two important and vital design methods for a flat website design.