The Benefits of Flat Design With its emphasis on white space, bold buttons and clear typography, flat design has the potential to let products shine.

While a digital user interface can be beautifully shaded with gradients and rounded corners, there's something a little more honest about flat design, an aesthetic that eliminates drop shadows and other attempts to create a sense of three-dimensional physicality.

The desire for a tactile-seeming experience made sense in the early days of the digital revolution, when consumers needed visual guidance to understand how to use their new iPhones and other devices. But now, with near-universal gadget penetration, many companies are turning to flat design as a more practical option for their websites and mobile platforms.

"Flat scales well to smaller screens," says Bradley Falk, CTO of New York City-based beauty startup Poshly, which revamped its website with flat-design principles. "This is because use of white space is important, but buttons are uncluttered and big--easy to identify on mobile, faster to render and have smaller payloads. Flat really helps here, because I can spend less time designing pages specifically for a mobile device."