We’ve seen web trends come and go over the years, but is one of the biggest trends—flat design—a fad or here to stay? Flat design provides balance between usability and aesthetics, while giving newly designed sites a fresh, contemporary look. Simplifying font choices and interface design can have a huge impact on the overall experience.
Simple means overly minimalistic and boring, right? Not necessarily. As the trend continues to evolve, designers are opting to build these flat interfaces with bold color palettes, sophisticated transparencies and well-planned spatial relationships to create beautiful and effective experiences. This style of design has been proven to play a large role in our increasing need to design for multiple platforms and devices. This clean, and somewhat minimalistic, approach translates to seamless responsive and adaptive designs across the board. Of course, today’s idea of flat design is far more sophisticated than when it first entered the web world: Designers have collectively raised the ante, adding flair and pushing the boundaries. Now we’re seeing some attractive, scannable sites—without creating a boring home page laden with content.
So how have we worked to simplify fonts on the web? We’ve all heard the overused phrase “less is more” (which I swore I’d never use in my professional career). The phrase really applies here, as we see sites starting to abandon multiple fonts and too much variation within a font family. Rather than bold, italic, medium, etc., the trend shows that simply changing font sizes, coupled with a few weight variations, is enough to establish hierarchy, while making a page comfortable to read—on any device.
Overall, websites are vessels to share content and engage users. Too simple can be considered boring and bland, while too much complexity can compete with the content and lose the target audiences. The evolving trend of flat, clean UX walks a fine line between the extremes and delivers beautiful, highly functional websites.
