Moving to a "flat" design!

Preamble

This post is dedicated to the upcoming update of GPS Locator and to flat designs. This update is mainly inspired by the movement of Apple and Microsoft to flatten the UI of their mobile platforms. A new trend (or style) is taking the world of UI and website design by storm - flat design [1]. Graphic elements become simpler in order to provide comfort to the user's eye. Colors are brighter and at the same time soothing.

Flat design

First let's answer the question: "what is flat design?". Most people would consider it as a philosophy rather than simple aesthetics. It incorporates the philosophy of a different kind of usability and user experience (UX). Its main characteristics are simplicity, clean user interface and ease of use. It is a minimalistic approach and style to designing websites and UI where we take a step back, strip away all the 3D elements, gradients, shadows and effects to leave behind the bare necessities [1].

The first to embrace this change are web sites. From blogs to simple web sites, everything is becoming flat. Many designers have published a lot of free resources to motivate independent software and web developers to embrace this new approach of building stuff. A lot of blogs try to explain flat design, most by example, since it's really hard to explain this movement by words. At fltdsgn.com someone can see various examples of flattie designed web sites.

Why moving to flat design

Computing devices are part of technology and technology is moving at a really fast pace, whether some people like it or not. So, application developers should keep up with the changes of the future. Thus they have to update and improve their application(s) as fast as possible, so they won't stay behind. So, it's time for a major UI update.

The Update

The app is almost ready, but as always it requires finishing touches and further checks to secure that everything works properly. So, above you see the new logo and below a few screenshots of the new UI. You can see the adoption of simple design, with no shadows or textures which makes the UI look clean and feel usable. It's smooth and clear as it should!

Hopefully, the update will be available within 2 weeks...

References

[1] Showcase Of Beautiful Flat UI Design - Hongkiat.com