The idea of Flat Design came from focusing more on usability. The philosophy is that our minds don’t need complex visual cues to understand what we are looking at. We are perfectly capable of recognizing shapes and giving them meaning with minimal cues.
Simple images convey messages faster than detailed illustrations. Icons can indicate actions or universal purposes of easy understanding.
So we remove unnecessary distractions that otherwise have no definitive purpose, and may only distract us from the purpose of the application. Plus, flat design makes it much easier to adjust to multiple screen sizes without the extra unnecessary graphics.
Common aspects of Flat design include:
- Bright, but muted colors
- Minimalistic icons
- Definitive geometric shapes
- Focus on simple imagery, and less on bodies of text
Bright colors are generally used because they make it easy to distinguish sections and make icons easy to understand, while being a very simple way of adding hierarchy.
A perfect example of this would be street signs or crosswalk signals. Next time you see a crosswalk sign, notice how the people represented in the sign are far from anatomically correct, yet we still perceive them as people. Icons like this are used because it is much easier and quicker to recognize a symbol than read words describing what the symbol means.
And of course you can use flat design in QlickView projects. Without unnecessary interference data visualization will become much more clear and easy to understand. Like the example below.
More examples of flat design:
What do you think about flat design?
References: http://www.commonplaces.com/blog/why-is-flat-design-so-popular/