It’s the 80s, and the technological landscape as we now know it is taking shape, with new interfaces and concepts born everyday. The computer is no longer just an office processing tool, but a new home appliance. How does a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with several thousand PC units make their product — previously only used by specialized professionals — a user-friendly staple of the household?

Enter skeuomorphism, a graphical interface design that models systems after their real-life counterparts. Incorporating real-life objects and actions into the digital process meant that users with no prior experience wouldn’t have to spend as much time figuring out which button does what. The idea behind having the save function look like a floppy disk or the folder for discarding files look like a trash can was to make these interfaces easier to learn and use.

By incorporating familiar elements, skeuomorphism lowered the barrier entry for new users, leveraging their existing knowledge of the real world to navigate an intuitive digital interface. It can also be used to build trust in a brand and foster a sense of reliability, especially important when it comes to a demographic that may be hesitant to embrace change. Essentially, humans look to the past to find comfort in the future.

This concept isn’t too foreign — it might even seem like a natural progression instead of a deliberate choice. It certainly predates the coining of the term and the digital revolution itself. Early teapots made of metal were designed to resemble their ceramic ancestors, even though retaining the same shape or patterns wasn’t a necessity. But it served a purpose. Even though users would have known how to use it (unless the new system particularly deviated from the original, as with computers) making the new tool feel familiar was key to the users’ comfort.

The rise of the smartphone: As our phones took on more tasks than the basic phone call and text message, apps had to reflect their function. A lot of these elements still exist on our phones today, but some of the more on-the-nose ones were retired. Steve Jobs was a big proponent of skeuomorphism in the early days of Apple, and that was reflected in early iOS designs. Remember when the iBooks application used to look like a real wooden bookshelf ? Or when the then-built in YouTube app icon was an oldtimeyTV ?

Skeuomorphism today may not be as heavy-handed as when it was first introduced, but we can still see it being implemented in things like haptic feedback from our keyboards to mimic the tapping of a physical one. From the push away from the hyper-realistic material design and towards subtly and cleaner design, came the birth of neumorphism.

Neumorphism was meant as a departure from the familiar without taking away the comfort. Coined by UI designer Michal Malewicz based on UX designer Olexander Plyuto’s art concept in 2019, he described it as a mix of the flat and minimal design popularized by Apple’s iOS 7 in 2017, with added depth borrowed and refined from classic skeuomorphic design. Neumorphism is a texture-based design more than it is a material one.

This design was quickly implemented by the tech industry, with Apple bringing depth back with iOS 17, and Samsung using the design in their marketing. The use of neutral backgrounds and soft shadows to create soft, natural curves seems to have attempted a balance between classic skeuomorphism and flat minimalism that leaned too heavily (and for some, defeatedly) into the move towards touch screens.

But this isn’t (even close to) the end of UI and UX design evolution. Not only is neumorphism difficult to execute from a backend perspective, it also failed to hit the benchmark of widely accepted web content accessibility standards. The low-contrast colors and elements were by all professional metrics just bad design. Neumorphic interfaces confused people, especially those with vision impairments or dyslexia, due to unclear and unlabeled elements that were just a little too abstract to grasp intuitively due to their departure from the classic design elements of real-world objects.

Is skeuomorphism dead? While it’s unlikely that design will skew that way heavily enough to revive the aesthetic as it was — the use of its elements on websites or in apps crops up feelings of defunct, dated, or sluggish tech — it will always be used as a reference of a successful bridge between digital tools and physical control.

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