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Styles
A fixed vocabulary of interface styles. Versions are tagged by eye against written criteria; a style's page shows the years it appears in the archive.
Skeuomorphic2007–2013
1 version · 1 productInterfaces that imitate physical materials: stitched leather, brushed metal, felt, glossy glass buttons and realistic shadows. It made touchscreens feel familiar when the iPhone was new and peaked in the iOS 6 era, before iOS 7 swept it away in 2013.
Flat2012–2018
26 versions · 7 productsSolid colour, no textures or shadows, thin type and simple geometric icons. Popularised by Microsoft's Metro (2010) and made mainstream by iOS 7 (2013), it was a reaction against skeuomorphic excess. Pure flatness hurt affordance, so it softened into “flat 2.0” with subtle shadows and layers.
Material2014–
10 versions · 1 productGoogle's design language built on a paper-and-ink metaphor: surfaces with elevation and shadow, bold colour, meaningful motion and the floating action button. Material You (2021) added colour drawn from your wallpaper and much larger corner radii.
Brutalism2016–
2 versions · 1 productDeliberately raw design: default system fonts, visible grids, hard borders, clashing colour and little polish. A reaction to templated, Bootstrap-era sameness. Its softened form, neo-brutalism (thick outlines, flat bright fills, hard drop shadows), spread through SaaS around 2021–2023.
Fluent2017–
Not tagged in the archive yetMicrosoft's successor to Metro: acrylic blur, light that reveals on hover, depth and motion. It marked the swing back from strict flatness toward material and translucency, and grew into the rounded Windows 11 look with Mica backgrounds.
Dark mode2018–
13 versions · 5 productsLight text on dark surfaces as a first-class theme rather than a niche option. After macOS Mojave (2018) and the system-wide dark modes of iOS 13 and Android 10 (2019), a dark variant became expected of most products. Platforms differ on the base: iOS uses true black, Material Design a dark grey.
Neumorphism2019–2021
Not tagged in the archive yet“New skeuomorphism”: soft extruded shapes made from the background colour, lit by a pair of light and dark shadows. Famous on Dribbble and rare in shipped products, because its low contrast fails accessibility. A short-lived reaction to flat design's sameness.
Big radius2019–
34 versions · 16 productsGenerous corner radii on cards, buttons, sheets and windows, echoing the rounded screens that arrived with the iPhone X. macOS Big Sur, Material You and Windows 11 made large radii the default, and the soft, friendly look became the decade's baseline.
Glassmorphism2020–
Not tagged in the archive yetFrosted, translucent panels with background blur and thin light borders, floating over colourful backdrops. Windows Vista's Aero Glass (2007) was an early system-wide version; the name arrived around 2020 with macOS Big Sur, and visionOS (2024) and Apple's Liquid Glass (2025) made it a system-wide language again.
AI gradient2023–
1 version · 1 productSoft multicolour gradients, glows and shimmering borders, often purple, blue and pink, used to signal “AI inside”. After ChatGPT (2022), sparkle icons and iridescent gradients became the visual shorthand for generative features.
Gradients
21 versions · 5 productsColour blending across a surface, a recurring technique rather than an era. Glossy Web 2.0 buttons used gradients for shine, flat design banished them, and they came back around 2016–2017 as bold, saturated backgrounds (Instagram's 2016 icon is the landmark) and later as mesh gradients.
Minimal
16 versions · 9 productsReduction to essentials: generous whitespace, restrained colour, few elements, with typography doing most of the work. A recurring technique rather than an era, it runs through Apple, Google's search page and much of today's software, often in quiet greys.
