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UI Design Trends
Claymorphism in user interfaces
How we crave an illusion of depth on our flat screens.
There is a new design trend emerging and this time it’s also stepping outside of the UI world and into the art space.
Hello, Claymorphism! 👋
We’ll get to the defining traits and features of this style in a minute. Before we do, we need to address the Neumorphic elephant in the room.
Depth reimagined. Again.
Let me start with the obvious. For reasons I stated in the very first article, Neumorphism didn’t really take off. I don’t think the biggest issue with it was accessibility, as it could be made accessible with a few tweaks. No, the bigger issue was that it was simply visually boring in most of the examples. To achieve a level of fidelity that would compensate for that, it would require a lot of artistic skills and almost impossible front-end capabilities.
It had a group of very strong supporters in the dev community, and some products were actually built using that style — for better or for worse.
However, designers were increasingly becoming bored with the typical flat-layered designs of most products. It seems like people wanted more depth, even if fake, but not necessarily done in the way neumorphism tried it.
Some real products were actually built using the Neumorphic style.
Neumorphism 2.0?
Since the early days of flat displays, we tried to simulate depth on them. That high-level skeuomorphic approach helps us better process what we’re looking at, while also being more friendly, organic and simply human.
