Loading: Neumorphism 2

The UI Design trend that refuses to die, may have some uses after all. Here’s why.

When I first started that whole Neumorphic mess, I wasn’t expecting it to go that far. All subsequent stories I wrote on that matter were negative towards the trend, bashing it for lack of originality and accessibility issues.

I had some interesting conversations on Design Trends lately and decided to pull back my negative approach a little bit. It’s not that Neumorphism is not good for anything.

It’s not a style, that can carry an entire product in itself.

But used scarcely it can bring that much needed breath of fresh air into an otherwise modern-material style UI. “Scarcely” being the key word here. There is a reason we’re not seeing fully Neumorphic UIs being coded. When you go beyond the initial fascination you realise that it just won’t work.

A large pile of similar looking layers will always look bland and boring.

But what if you spice-it up and make up for the lack of contrast with high-contrast layers in between? Then most of the accessibility problems go away, as the figure-to-background ratio would have enough contrast every time.

Is that enough to carry a full product?

No. But it’s a step in a better direction.

As I mentioned before, Neumorphism works well, when it can be removed without hurting the design.

Example of a good use-case

So imagine a simple slider the way most young adepts of this technique try to design it early on.

The version on the left doesn’t make sense. The version on the right, due to higher contrast works well even if you can’t discern the low-contrast shadows at all.