I guess flat design can be tied back into that tension/mixed metaphor between electromechanical and print analogs - it's based on a decision to lean towards the print side of things. Actually the designers of early-ish influential "flat" designed systems such as Windows Phone 7 were quite self-conscious about this, e.g., https://web.archive.org/web/20120322023540/http://mkruzenisk... (from 2011)
Thanks for the reply and that link. That article is replete with pretty bogus assertions, even for its time. Print is not all that informative for interactive presentations, aside from general principles of good layout with whitespace and appropriate visual emphasis. The article does indeed mention those, but goes on and on about print without saying what it has to do with buttons you need to press or values you need to adjust.
The article also treats all physical-control analogies as bad because of their (now-recognized-as) ridiculous descent into skeuomorphism. But before we had cheesy "leather" textures in "notebook" UIs, or "painted felt" that you could click on in a Blackjack game UI, we had simple two-pixel-wide highlights or shadows on the edges of buttons that instantly told you
A. This is a button.
B. The button is "pressed."
At some point you can't do better than cues afforded by the real world. In the real world (even one full of touchscreens instead of mechanical switches), when you press on something malleable it will deform, and the light and shadow on it will change, showing you it's now concave where you pressed it. If it retains its shape, someone can come along an hour later and say, yep, this thing has been pressed.
This doesn't need to be (and never will need to be) learned. Therefore it makes much more sense to stick with minimalist real-world analogs than trying to invent some new design "language" that we're all supposed to memorize and that makes sense across all cultures. No no, blue means ON! Brown means OFF!
There's room for new clues, of course. "Greying out" unavailable functions is the best example I can think of. But I'd argue that reducing the contrast on something and making it less visible tells the user intuitively that it's ineffective (or less effective).
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