What Is Flat Design?

Date First Published: 25th February 2024

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Design

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 5/10

CONTENTS

Characteristics Of Flat Design
Advantages and Disadvantages Of Flat Design

Learn about what flat design is in this article.

Flat design is a simple user interface design that uses simple elements, typography, and flat colours. It focuses on minimalism, functionality, and usability without using shading or extra details to make graphics look 3D. The goal is to keep things as simple as possible without any fancy extras.

Flat design is widely used across various industries and platforms. For example, Microsoft, Apple, and Google have used flat design principles in their operating systems. Social media platforms and web development tools also use flat design for its simplicity and visually appealing properties.

Characteristics Of Flat Design

Flat design has the following characteristics:

It avoids shadows, structures, colour gradients, and other ways that add depth to an element.
It has smooth, sharp elements without 3rd dimension.
It has simple shapes, such as circles, rectangles, or squares and no fancy, realistic images.
It focuses on typography. Designers usually use simple and fast-loading sans serif fonts to match the other elements' minimalist designs.
It focuses on clear, bright colours with more shades than other websites. Most web applications focus on a few colours, but designers tend to use six to eight different colours for flat design webpages.
It often follows a symmetrical grid for organisation purposes.
It uses basic shapes, no textures, and no fancy colour blends.

Advantages and Disadvantages Of Flat Design

The advantages of flat design are:

It makes it easier to quickly present information whilst still looking visually appealing. With its minimalistic elements, it helps users focus on the content of a website.
With the use of simple shapes and minimal textures, flat design ensures that responsive designs work well and load fast. This makes it easier to design a user interface that is responsive to changes in browser size across different devices.
They reduce the amount of data required when accessing a website, meaning that pages can be downloaded more quickly and are more accessible to users with low-bandwidth connections.

The disadvantages of flat design are:

It can make user interfaces less intuitive and usable. Making all design elements (e.g. menus, buttons, links, etc) flat can make it harder to differentiate between different elements. Users may not always know which elements can be clicked. Because of this, flat design is often done in a more balanced way, often referred to as "flat design 2.0".
The user interface may not be understandable by all users. Important functions and interactive elements can be hidden or visual hints that users are familiar with may be missing just to create simplicity.