when will the flat icon meme end

I don't mind a few companies doing it, but who is telling them they all have to drink the kool aid?

Also, who convinced these designers that a random shadow in the background looks good? It always looks tacky

>>306562
the shadows are aweful, but i love the simple flat design.

i bet you loved the win7 aero design

>>306562
these "flat" icons are actually more detailed than non"flat" ones
disgusting

>>306563
To some degree, consistency is a design virtue. If half the icons on your home screen all look the same way because they're preinstalls, the individual devs of the other half will all try to blend in in their own way.

That said, seriously, look at this shit. There's so little shared kool-aid there that it's impossible to describe as one style; the only shared elements are a lack of stroke and the use of at least one low-saturation color; we're well past "flat" as a design trend and into "make it flat" from clients like they used to say "make it pop", just to convince themselves that they know what we're doing.

(OP also cheated a little. 1-2 and 3-2, as well as 1-5 and 2-1, are each duplicates kek)

There's literally nothing wrong with being flat

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>>306562
When front end web development gets more sophisticated. Right now we use flat, solid colour CSS and SVG to build our user interfaces because it's the web standard technology. We can't just make everything an image because load times would be too long.

WebGL will progress enough that 3D on the web is performant enough to be common place. Then we'll see new opportunity for designers to break out of flat design.

>>306752
What in seven hells are you talking about? Literally nothing you've said makes sense. At all. It's literally so wrong it's like a conversation about "why the sky is blue" and you answering "CHOCOLATE!"

First, the web from 10 years ago used more '3D' artwork and styling than it does today. The flat style of today is a trend, not a technological limitation. We used those images which you think makes loading things impossible.

Second, nobody in their right mind will ever pipe 3D models for WebGL to construct icons. It's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And do you think piping 3D models would be load time friendly? Do you think everyone has 3D capable hardware? What about battery usage on phones?

Third, why are you bringing up the web at all? This applies just as much to the desktop, and if it wasn't a trend thing then we'd already be using your crazy 3D accelerated icons on the desktop. But we aren't, because that's insane. Desktops have none of the limitations you state, but every. single. one. has dumped shiny 3D glossy icons for flat icons.

Just... Gah. I hope you're a troll, I really, really do. Because you said "we" like a designer employed somewhere, and that scares me.

>>306866
why would you get so mad at something in the internet?

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>>306866
I'm actually 100% right. You're adding nothing to the conversation with your nay-saying.
I'm an industry professional with years of experience. You sound like the only work you've ever done is designing a logo for you uncle's plumbing business. And you payment was not having to suck him off that evening.

The web is flat by default. Fact. Flat design is easy and performant on the web. Fact. You're a gimp. Fact.

>>307082
You're a faggot. Fact.

>>306562
Isn't this post a meme yet?

>>306562
What the hell is wrong with you? It took us forever to rid interactive design of bevels, fuzzy drop shadows, gradients on every surface, faux 3D and skeumorphic textures. We aren't going back.

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agreed the pointless shadows are faddy but its actually come full circle to what graphic design was before everyone got all shiny-eyed with the ability to make completely unneccessary glossy 3d shite.

pic related, classic design that works just as well now as it did then

>>307263
>>307265
Agree 100%
Flat design is to stay.
Maybe in other variations and without the rounded look and drop shadow.. BUT it is still the best we got in a while

>>307263
>What the hell is wrong with you?
He grew up at a point of western culture where 3D crap was considered good, and so it never occurred to him that 3D crap could be bad.
The post-modernists were right and you're all fools. Damn.

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>>306752
Yeah hopefully we'll let go of this ugly "flat design" and go back to god-tier glossy design for good.

>>306866
im not >>306752

But 10 years ago we didn't have standards and people just dumped shit onto web pages, the geocities era of old where pages took minutes to load. http://www.cameronsworld.net/

WebGL uses code to render "3d" into a browser (2d also, seen an app icon change recently?), not just loading a video/etc etc, its irrelevant but if people make an interface that way, who'll blame them.

Why do you actually like the gloss era icons outside of nostalgia? adding a heap of low quality effects that contribute nothing to the overall design is shit for the indians to do anon

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>>306866
>10 years ago used more '3D' artwork and styling than it does today.
then smartphones entered the game and websites needed to be responsive you actual gutter hog

>>306562
Some of the flat icons are really cure and I realize that some are very detailed, maybe even a little too detailed, but for the most part I think the entire concept looks lazy. Clean cut, yes, but also lazy.

>>307608
? it doesn't take any less effort to draw, say, a 64x64 IBM logo compared to a 64x64 image of a fully-raytraced 3D IBM logo floating in a fishtank of kool-aid with a chrome rim. We just "moved to flat" - better stated as "moved back to how human beings have expressed symbols since the first time some Chinese dude stamped his seal with its vermilion ink 4,000 years ago" - because 3d glossy full representationalism misses the entire point of an expressive icon and then ruins it further with entirely meaningless gloss.

>>307628
Where you see "lazy", most of the world sees "not gaudy".
Not denying that some of OP's examples are really bad, but that's what happens when you argue "this trend is shit" while picking your examples entirely from royalty-free megapacks.

>>306562
already gone

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rarely any designer has the skill to properly execute le sekumorphizm

>>307657
Are these done in vector? Because otherwise have fun when 4K is standard and 8K comes along.

>>306562
hipsters like this garbage, what do you expect

>>307538
Yurk... Looks like toys or PSX games UI

>>306562
I agree, I want it to end. Boring as shit. Smarmy, like someone is trying to appear whimsical and childish while also trying really hard to sell me something. Strongly associated with late-20s hipster guys with long beards who are "deeply passionate" about "feminist and anti-racist activism".

Life just sucks desu.

>>307263
Fuck you, I'm dragging us back.

>>307657
this is nice.

>>307278
>The post-modernists were right and you're all fools. Damn.
What do you mean?

>>308343
Both of which are inherently more valuable than your shitty Web 3.0 startup that uses a flat design.

>>307657
It screams 2010 and instagram.

Ugly and outdated. Looks like an icon pack for ios 8.

>>306562
When something better comes along.

Complex buttons are resource intensive and just don't look good. Find me a good icon group that isn't flat.

If you want it to die, how about you give us something to replace it with?

>>308325
>4k
>standard
>on phones
literally never

>>308730
Yet here we are phones using 1920x1080 what was previously a desktop monitor standard

More importantly, what's going to be the design trend that replaces flat icons?

>>306562
anybody else hate the mem flat icons with 315deg shadows that aren't even "complete"? Look at the green thumbs up in the top row of OP's image to see what I mean.

>>308363
>glossy
>valuable
Pick one

>>308325

make more sizes of icons?

or

make 8k image of the icon and resize down by 50%

>>309228
you don't know what a vector is, don't you?

>>308732
can you guys stop using pixels as something relevant in graphic design?
Ratios, percentages, proportions, relations.
pixels are arbitrary and will change.
if you're working on a graphic interface for a phone, the physical size of the screen is a million times more relevant than pixel count. especially when you're working with high resolutions.

>>306562 (OP)
When will everything stop being a "meme" and just be something that happens. Why did the Internet have to ruin everything by calling anything a "meme". I once heard a kid say that the nursery rhyme that goes "johnny johnny yes papa" was a "big meme" in his school, probably elementary or middle school or something.

Please somebody kill me.

[spoiler]also flat icons are pretty good but all those shadows are really fucking annoying[/spoiler]

>>309550
fuck me I tried editing the post to fix spoiler but copied it and left in the (OP) and spoilers still don't work on /gd/

Flat design is ok if you are a lazy af "designer" or a 4th grade kid, prove me wrong
>Protip: you can't
Hard mode: No muh simplicity

>>310131

CLARITY OF VISUAL PRESENTATION muhfugga bix nood

>>306587
i wouldn't even call this trend flat anymore. the flat design i know uses the bare basic of color contrast and typography to create a minimal style/aesthetic.
this is just designers adding random shadows everywhere for no real reason. it doesn't make anything look 3 dimensional nor does it make it look pretty. the shadows just look sloppy and generic, almost like they're trying to do what google did with their gmail logo but not really

>>309210
flat design is already moving away from it's principles. we're already starting to get shittons of shadows to convey 3-dimensional space a la material design, but the problem with that is that most designers nowadays have no fucking clue how to pull that off. literally all they did to those icons is add a shitty little shadow because that's what google did with their logos.

the difference between google and those guys is that google put time and thought into their logos, kind of.

>>310131
Meanwhile, show us one example of good design. Just one.

>>306752
>>307082
I don't think you really know or understand what WebGL is.
I'm not sure that >>307540 does either. (Not sure what was meant by the "app icon" thing.)
>>306866 seems to be the only one who understands that rendering 3D models is a bad idea.

3D is not magic. It eventually gets converted to a 2D image so that you can display it on your screen. Basically, WebGL lets developers take a 3D model, apply textures to it, apply shaders to it, and then using that 3D model, as well as a specified camera angle, generate a raster image which it paints to the screen. Since it has to do this about 60 times a second, all this is accelerated by the GPU.

So, WebGL is really only useful if you have a 3D model of a UI, and you want to animate it, or present it from different perspectives. This is almost never the case, so WebGL is pretty much never used for normal UI. It's mostly used for games or simulations.

Also, I don't know why you think 3D models are gonna be lighter to load than regular images.

You can simulate the illusion of depth pretty easily if you know what you're doing with CSS. You can even rotate a graphic in 3D space using some simple transforms or a transform matrix.

Flat design isn't great, but it looks better than the old, gradient-heavy style of the old web.

Material design is probably a step up from flat; it's simple, but things actually have depth, and they look like buttons you can press instead of stickers. It's really not that hard with CSS, it's just a border on the bottom and right sides for thickness, plus maybe a box-shadow.


tl;dr - It's a hell of a lot easier to make something look like it has some depth than to actually render a 3D model of your UI in a browser.