What is skeuomorphic design? This word, in all its obscurity, describes the way design borrows particular features from the past i.e. shutter noises that are prerecorded to remind us of analog film cameras or calendars that use lined paper or ring bindings. The official explanation for what constitutes skeuomorphic design goes something like this. “A skeuomorph is a physical ornament or design on an object copied from a form of an object when made from another material or by other techniques”. While this explanation only mentions “physical ornaments” digital design has seen the popularity of skeuomorphism rise since the introduction of the iOS inspired trends such as realistic textures and life-like control. The opposite of this is called “Flat style” to which Microsoft’s Metro UI is the most commonly used example. Flat style incorporates minimalism, lack of texture or lighting effects for flat shapes and colours. To put it in a more precise way this new trend is not always about Skeuomorphism, which implies connections to past designs but rather, more often about realism. Realism is a purely visual style that tries to imitate real world materials and textures, which can be exemplified by Apples use of leather textures in some of their own apps. Often these 2 design styles can be used in conjunction with each other: Skeuomorphic design tends to look realistic to make the connection to the real life object obvious and realistic objects tend to look skeuomorphic because the realism would look weird and out of place otherwise. So if we look at realism as a purely visual style we can see that skeuomorphism affects design on a much deeper level. Loren Brichter from Tweetie & Letterpress states,  “Skeuomorphism is not bad at all. We need that to interact with devices in a human way. Gaudy textures are just a visual design problem I hope they tone it down. “ So if this issue is “gaudy textures”, how did we end up with them? And how come designers are getting tired of them? The recent backlash against flat design can be traced to the introduction of the iPhone way back in 2007. Before the iPhone realistic user interfaces were something that we only really saw in video games. In order to immerse the players into the game world designers created their interfaces from wood, stone and metal. Diablo 2 is a prime example of this sort of design, where by stone-wrought menu screens and glass health meters supported by gothic statues are used. In a more serious context realism is still very limited, one notable exception was the introduction of glass, web 2.0 style buttons on early versions of Mac OS X. One might say that these incarnatio