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I have to agree. Light and depth are babies I would rather not throw out with the skeomorphic bath water.
It is especially useful in a windowing interface to have some idea of depth.
Also flat interfaces are falsely seen as non-skeomorphic. Just swapping real world objects and textures for real world signs, posters and screen print style flat tones are equally skeomorphic.
I was going to post this but you've phrased it better than I ever could.
I cannot stress enough how good subtle shadows are as allowing the viewer to differentiate different objects on the same pane.
Plus Facebook is easily one of the worst examples of design done well (flat aesthetics or otherwise). It's crowded with no clear grouping and even has some content duplicated. Plus there's a confusing mismatch of hover-over, click through, pop up and drop down interfaces that leave me lost whenever I'm trying to perform something new. It's the kind of site that relies on it's users committing common actions to muscle memory.




Member since:
2010-01-21
To be honest, I think I'm firmly in the middle.
I don't like skeuomorphism, but I also find flat design to be unpalatable.
I suppose what I'm looking for is more along the lines of my GTK+ and Qt themes. Subtle use of subdued gradients, shadows, and curves to provide an interface that's consistent and non-distracting but, at the same time, doesn't remind me of how much work I've put into making Motif applications like DDD and Tk applications like git-gui less off-putting.