Material Honesty

Digital materials have their own properties: pixels, resolution, rendering engines, interaction latency. Designs that pretend to be something else often fail to be anything at all.

Skeuomorphism — the design language of early touchscreen interfaces — attempted to map digital surfaces to physical analogs. Bookshelves with wooden grain. Note-taking apps with yellow legal pads. The metaphors were useful for onboarding users who had no prior mental model of touch interaction. The bookshelf made the library concept legible. But the metaphor became a cage: the physical world doesn't have infinite scrolling bookshelves or context menus on yellow legal pads.

What the digital medium actually is

The digital surface has its own inherent properties worth designing with rather than against. It is infinitely reconfigurable — the same canvas can be a camera, a terminal, a canvas, a calculator. It responds to touch, gesture, voice, and pointer with equivalent immediacy. It can animate, adapt to time, respond to location, and maintain state across sessions. These aren't constraints to be hidden behind a veneer of physicality; they're the material itself.

Flat design, in its best form, was an argument for material honesty: let the screen be a screen. Depth should be earned through shadow where shadow communicates something real about layering, not applied decoratively to make things look less flat. Motion should describe spatial relationships, not perform physicality for its own sake.

Authenticity without austerity

Material honesty doesn't require austerity. A rich illustration, an expressive animation, a warmly textured surface can all be materially honest if they're doing something the medium affords rather than compensating for what it lacks. The question isn't "does this look physical" but "does this work with what this medium actually is?"