A symbol is a symbol. A flat monochrome floppy disk icon represents the concept of saving a file just the same as a lovingly rendered 3D floppy disk or even a photograph would.
Text glyphs are very flat, abstract symbols that represent sounds or ideas (indeed, I'm pretty sure the whole "flat design" trend was inspired by typography in the first place). Sure, we've been hunting beasts for much longer than we've been reading and writing, but written language is still a very old invention in the human timescale. And art predates even that. Humanity has had plenty of experience with symbolic visuals over the ages, I think we're equipped well enough to use basic smartphone apps.
Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be.
Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.
Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen.
Modern minimalism only became fashionable a century or so ago, which was - coincidentally - around the time artists started experimenting with extreme abstraction.
Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too.
Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels.
It's a difference of metaphorical and literal depth. Ignoring scale-dependence robs content of weight.
So minimalism is literally shallow. It's aesthetic lossy compression - abstraction into illegibility, for the sake of abstraction.
You can get away with that in art if you have something interesting to say. But it's really not the best of all possible solutions for UI/UX.
>Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be.
>Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.
>Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen.
But you don't see the depth of the stroke or the texture of the paper when you're reading. You see abstract lines. You don't see the imperfect squiggles our meat-appendages create unless you really focus; at a glance, your brain autocorrects them into the intended strokes.
>Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too.
>Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels.
Sure, we're well equipped to handle symbols, but we're better equipped to handle pictures. How much training does a toddler require to recognize the word "duck" versus a picture of an actual duck? I argue that you'd be comparing a time span of seconds to a time span of years.
But again, with training the efficiency in processing a symbol versus a picture becomes negligible. What matters is whether or not it looks good. Right now everyone likes flat design.
The only technical advantage flat design has over a more traditional approach is that it releaves a huge amount of burden from the designer. An icon of a floppy disc is way easier to draw then a 3d picture of a floppy. I would argue that flat design has allowed people with zero skill in traditional art to become "designers"
Text glyphs are very flat, abstract symbols that represent sounds or ideas (indeed, I'm pretty sure the whole "flat design" trend was inspired by typography in the first place). Sure, we've been hunting beasts for much longer than we've been reading and writing, but written language is still a very old invention in the human timescale. And art predates even that. Humanity has had plenty of experience with symbolic visuals over the ages, I think we're equipped well enough to use basic smartphone apps.