Right. 1
So let's address flat design because I've spoken about it quite a few times. And this is actually quite 2
interesting because initially if you're remember iOS 6 and previous, the iPhone home screen was always 3
like these glassy, jiggly icons which were very 3D and had a lot of contrast and they obviously stood 4
out from the screen. 5
Now since iOS 7 the design concept has been going towards something called flat design. 6
Now a typical representation of flat design is something like this image on the right. You can see that 7
there's very little if any shadowing, 8
there's pretty much no contrast and there's no gradients. 9
So the idea is that it's like as if it's a piece of glass. 10
There's nothing that stands out up from the screen. On the left 11
is Google's design principle which is material design. 12
And it's funny because previous to material design, the concept at Google was flat design. 13
It's like as if Apple and Google did a swap on each other. 14
And iOS is now flat 15
and Google is now slightly 3D, what they call material design. 16
So material design is meant to be exactly that. It's meant to feel like paper and card, real materials. 17
So for example, if we look at something that looks a bit like the Instagram screen, 18
so where you display your images. On iOS it's like as if you're looking at a piece of glass. On Android 19
however it's more like if you've got a piece of paper that's lying on a piece of card and personally 20
even though I spend most of my time designing for iOS and working with the iOS environment I prefer 21
the material design look and feel because as humans we need indications as to what can we interact with 22
on a digital screen. 23
And I believe something that just looks like a plain piece of glass with no indications as to what is 24
a button, 25
what is a label, what is just text. 26
Makes it very confusing for users and I don't think it's optimal user experience. Whereas something like 27
this where there's subtle hints, 28
what is something that you can interact with, I think is a better design. And I think I would predict 29
that in a few more years you'll see the iOS environment going more towards something like this as well 30
just simply because it's better user experience.