Necessity of Using Flat Design and Tips on Incorporating it a Website


If you’re a design savvy person then probably you would have heard of the term flat design. Many people are calling “Flat Design” as a web trend. Irrespective of whether this trend will stay or go, it’s important for designers to stay up-to-date with the latest trends. And so, each and every web designer must understand the concept of flat design.

An Overview of Flat Design

Flat design is a design approach that emphasizes minimalist use of elements and opposes use of drop shadows, gradients or textures. It features clean and clutter free 2D illustrations. The concept of flat design started making the rounds, when “Metro” design interface was introduced in Windows 8; where the design focused on brighter colors, content in grid layout, simple typography and so on.

Simply put, flat design focuses on using flat colors and simple typography. Below are a few benefits that a flat design offers:

  • Flat designed websites load faster in comparison to sites that contains 3D animations and complex graphics.

  • Flat design can easily adapt and adjust to mobile devices with different screen resolutions. And with, mobile devices gaining becoming the most preferred source to access the Internet than the web browsing tools, designing a flat website is an advantage for site owners seeking to build a site optimized for both mobile devices as well as desktop screen.

  • Many users gets easily attracted to simplicity and prefer it over designs that are stuffed with flashy design elements. In addition, simple images easily and quickly convey your messages compared to detailed illustrations.

 Useful Tips on Using Flat Design in Your Website

 Here are a few tips you should consider when designing a site using flat design:

Avoid Using Effects: Ditch using any effects in your web design like bevels, gradients, animated transitions, drop shadows etc that adds depth or a sense of motion to your web design elements. In simple words, in a site with a flat design layout nothing is added to make the elements look real, such as 3D illustrations.

2. Go For Simple Elements: Flat design make use of simple elements such as shapes, icons and buttons. Avoid using buttons with loud images or 3D effects, instead apply bold color to clickable buttons. Moreover, stick to using simple shapes such as squares, rectangles or any other; such shapes helps to create division of content and a hierarchy that help users understand the structure of web pages. In addition, when adding icons to your web design make sure to integrate icons that are simple to understand.

3. Consider a Bright Color Pallet: Flat design comprises of brighter color pallets that are more colorful than sites with a non-flat design. While color pallets focuses on adding not more than 2 – 3 colors, in contrast, a flat design color pallet focuses on using 6 – 8 colors. Colors such as bright pink, green, blue, purple etc. are some of the most commonly used colors in a website having a flat design.

4. Simple Navigation Menu: Make sure to keep your navigation menus simple and do not add any hover effect or links to the menu. Your navigation menu must contain minimal designs and shouldn’t contain anything other than text. Often adding effects such as images instead of text in the navigation menu makes it difficult for the users to understand – what exactly does an item in the menu determines.

5. Focus on Typography: When designing a site with a flat design layout, the text displayed on your website should be compelling enough to grab users’ attention within a few seconds. Put simply, since you’re not using any effects in your site content, make sure to use typefaces that match your entire website design. Keep your type bold, written in simple words efficiently. For instance, consider using “sans serif” type family with several variations and right weights to add innovativeness to typography.

6. Use Ready-to-Use Flat Templates: If you don’t want to create a flat-designed website from the ground up, you can choose ready-to-use flat website templates available online. Moreover, using these templates will help you build a site without spending lot of your time and effort.

Conclusion

So, if you too want to create a web design with a flat design then following the aforementioned tips will certainly help you incorporate flat design to your site.