Pure Visual Designers, Wake up!

Recently, Instagram changed its logo and the overall look and feel of its mobile application. Most of the people did not even notice that the blue colour has vanished from the entire application since the app has a lot of beautiful images as the principal point of focus! Surprisingly Instagram is not the only one who is throwing out the colours from the apps. Medium has been in black and white for a long time now and then the epitome was Apple changing their iTunes app to go on to similar lines.

There is a new trend emerging and people are calling it #Complexion Reduction. A step beyond flat design where you eliminate all the colours and triple the white space. The entire UI turns black and white, allowing images and headings to stand out more. Any colour, if at all used, is almost invisible. The icons are getting simpler and line-based. The selected icon is filled! The thought behind typography has changed from “Minimum readable size” to “maximum allowable size”!

This got me thinking, about the way people, especially the visual designers worked, just 3 years ago. Apple changed the entire way of designing the UI by introducing the flat design in 2013 in its iOS7. Many established designers criticized the decision apple had taken by introducing extremely thin line icons and basic structures filled in with gradients. I remember that day in September 2013 when my Facebook timeline was filled with Memes mocking Jonathan Ive’s decision!

But soon, people accepted it. The way people looked at the concept of visual design changed. Up till iOS6, every icon was painstakingly crafted to match the texture of the real-life object. Every app icon took a lot of time and revisions to convey what the app was all about in a tiny 60 X 60 PX space, that too, with rounded off corners! Since the world was competitive, the look and feel had to be the best in class for the apps. Visual designers were one of the most important key factors in the development cycle. iOS 7 changed this concept to simple, flat single line objects! The task was way much easier than the earlier one!

Android phones were gaining popularity and to unify the application design across all apps, Google introduced something called Material Design. Material design was a step ahead of iOS 7’s complete flat concept. This was followed by iOS 8, 9 and now recently 10, which work on a similar philosophy.

To make the task even easy for the designers, multiple repositories emerged, where you can easily find icons that you need and use them. Icons8, flaticon are few examples of these online repositories. Any person who knows a little bit about the best practices in alignment and colour theory could now design any app, without the help of a core visual designer! Recently this has taken a new step called Complexion Reduction, which makes the job of the 2013 version of a visual designer, obsolete!

The point being, in just three years the importance of visual designers have gone from "extremely important" to "can do without them"! Image processing was another area where the visual designers played a vital role, but now, multiple online tools can generate awesome results in lesser time!

The trend that captured the entire mobile UI patterns also seeped into the web world. Material design is applicable everywhere, across form factors. There too, the traditional visual designers have lost their pole position in the race of importance. Today most people prefer a portal that allows the creation of websites by people who do not know to program. Weebly, Wix, WordPress and many more tools come with a predefined theme. The only job you have is to fill in the data and images!

In short, the need for a core visual designer is reducing with each new launch. Every day, something new is released in the online market which is more simple and more minimal and pretty easy to make, using very basic tools, sometimes like PowerPoint!

In India, large companies have separate departments for two of the most important facets of the entire design process. One of them is a set of people who do research, create information architecture, design layouts and create wire-frames of the complete flow of interactions, whereas the second one is the set of artists who convert wire-frames into a fine looking piece of art, with gradients, shadows and skeuomorphic icons! This discussion is targeted towards the later, who only possess the skills of a visual designer and have not got themselves involved in the interaction design process as such so far!

Technology is advancing pretty fast. The launch of the “chatbots” has opened a new way of interacting with devices. The chatbots can use an existing communication channel to get multiple things done. Once the chatbots get popular the task of UX designers will get intensified from designing a complete app to designing a widget to execute the same task. The widget will get integrated programmatically with the channel, eliminating the need for visually designing the interface in the first place.

In conclusion, the importance of pure visual designers has dived since 2013. The only way these artists can survive in the rapidly upgrading IT world is by expanding their skill sets. So all the pure visual designers, this is a wake-up call!