Buttons that admit they're buttons.

A button should look like a button.

This is not a radical position. It was, for most of the history of interface design, so obvious that nobody bothered to say it. A button had a border, a shadow, a slight raise — visual cues that said press me. You didn’t need a tooltip. You didn’t need onboarding. The object explained itself.

The flat decade.

Sometime around 2013, we collectively decided that buttons should stop looking like buttons. They became flat rectangles, ghost outlines, bare text with no border. The word for what they lost is affordance — the visual property of an object that tells you how to use it.

The argument for flat design was aesthetic: shadows and gradients looked dated. The argument against it was practical: people couldn’t find the buttons. Studies showed that flat interfaces increased time-to-action. Users tapped on things that weren’t tappable and missed things that were.

The quiet return.

We’re seeing affordances come back now, but slowly and without anyone admitting the flat decade was a mistake. Buttons have subtle shadows again. Links are underlined again. The design industry is rediscovering that a door handle should look like something you grab.