mbishop

auxio said:

One major reason why it made sense to drop skeuomorphism in iOS is because the screens it's running on are a lot smaller.  Adding depth to interface elements takes a fair number of pixels/screen real estate, which leaves less room for the actual content the person is interested in.

I used to think this, until I started looking more closely at flat designs and I realized that designs using separator lines and  shadow, were very effective at showing visual hierarchy in a compact way. Once those are taken away, it is very hard to see how items are grouped and related. The only way left to show those relationships, is to add space and that’s the reason why today’s flat designed have a lower density of information that the prior designs.

Those pre-ios7 designs showed a lot of information on very small screens (all pre-iPhone 6).