Don't get me wrong, I love flat design and its influence. But design has to serve a function.
Flat design has brought back a clean, simple beauty in graphic design that I really enjoy.
But — spoiler alert! — design has to work.
It’s useless to design a button or link that nobody can find. No matter how cool the design gets, at the point where you can’t tell a button is a button or a link is a link, you’re no longer doing purposeful design.
Uselessness can have a purpose too of course: fun, art, play… but only when it’s used on purpose, not by accident of bad design.
The user interface studiers at Nielsen Norman Group have studied the perception of clickability and their article Making Clickable Elements Recognizable includes examples of nice looking designs that don’t do the job.
So give me some flat design, but don’t steamroller the usability!