People sometimes forget that the move to flat design was not entirely arbitrary and driven by fashion, it was driven by shifting technology and usage.
Sure, fashion played a role, but in this case the main driver was the need to support devices of different resolutions. Scalability implies vectors, which implies shapes, fills, and strokes rather than bitmap assets.
As a designer who made "skeuomorphic" interfaces before the shift, supporting even a couple of different device sizes with hundreds of different PNG slices had already gotten unsustainable by 2010, and moving to a vector-based workflow was a breath of fresh air.
The pendulum did swing a little too far: some of the early human interface guidelines were wary of the concept of lighting (gradients and shadows). But, realistically, that was unworkable, and those guidelines changed because nobody followed them.
"Flat design" as a moment was actually pretty short. Later iterations on the concepts explored during that moment, such as Material, were actually thoughtful and workable, in my opinion.
> early human interface guidelines were wary of the concept of lighting
Someone needs to go out and patent using multiple ambient light sensors to detect where light sources are relative to a screen, then shade skeuomorphic elements accordingly.
Some pre-7 versions of iOS would adjust the sheen on certain graphics (like one of the Settings icons, if memory serves) based on the gyroscope, so as you rotated the device the specular highlights would appear to move. Not exactly the same, but similar spirit.
From a CSS perspective, shadows, opacity, round borders, and other transformations are very expensive, so flat design is also a matter of resources constraint, they might look fluid, because with time the rendering backend got GPU speed ups, but they would still consume more power/ run a device hotter; this is probably less relevant on native guis..
The web already had solved that problem, even with bootstrap version 2. Surely apple provides primitives such as border-radius and gradients, which are enough to create an eye-catching button?
The level of skeuomorphic design never really hit the web the same as it was on iOS before version 7. Remember the pool table green felt and wood trim of Game Center? That sort of thing is probably extremely expensive to design and maintain for the wide range of screens offered by Apple products.
Sure, fashion played a role, but in this case the main driver was the need to support devices of different resolutions. Scalability implies vectors, which implies shapes, fills, and strokes rather than bitmap assets.
As a designer who made "skeuomorphic" interfaces before the shift, supporting even a couple of different device sizes with hundreds of different PNG slices had already gotten unsustainable by 2010, and moving to a vector-based workflow was a breath of fresh air.
The pendulum did swing a little too far: some of the early human interface guidelines were wary of the concept of lighting (gradients and shadows). But, realistically, that was unworkable, and those guidelines changed because nobody followed them.
"Flat design" as a moment was actually pretty short. Later iterations on the concepts explored during that moment, such as Material, were actually thoughtful and workable, in my opinion.