Member-only story

Neumorphism: can we make it more accessible?

2020’s hottest UI trend meets practicality.

Michael J. Fordham
UX Collective
4 min readJan 26, 2020

Graphic of human finger tapping a button labelled ‘click me’.

Neumorphism” is a new slang term in design circles — co-created by Michal Malewicz — which essentially crosses the words “new” and “skeuomorphism”.

Essentially, it’s a new, minimal way to design with a soft, extruded plastic look. It’s almost as if the interface has been vacuum-formed. And let’s just get it out the way right now: it’s dividing opinions.

I personally like the look and think it brings a fresh new challenge to UI designers and front-end developers everywhere.

One of those challenges, of course, is accessibility.

A neumorphic thermostat user interface.
A thermostat concept by Andrew Millen on Dribbble

Conventional buttons tend to stand out quite well, with borders clearly defined and a focused state different enough to the unfocused to be enough that a user will know they’ve performed an action.

However, if we look at neumorphic buttons, we could run into an issue.

Borders are not easy to see and blend in with the background. While this is part of the charm of neumorphism, it also makes it harder to use.

Create an account to read the full story.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Michael J. Fordham

Software engineer interested in the future of innovative UX. I mainly write about design, development, data and AI. www.michaeljfordham.com

Responses (13)

What are your thoughts?

Or… MMMaybeee… we can ditch this “neuomorphism” altogether since it’s just a dribbble trend, not a real life thing

I believe this is just demonstrating how to create inaccessible buttons that can pass a WCAG checker.
You can easily trick a WCAG checker into believing there’s enough contrast between a 1px border and a button, but realistically that border will be invisible to people with low vision.

Instead of getting caught up on terminology and shaming “neumorphism” as a “trend”, I think it’s helpful to understand why it exists: For a long time, I’ve felt that skeumorphism and flat design shouldn’t be antithetical philosophies, but rather…