1) Flat Design is here to stay
So the flat design is sticking around for a while it seems. People are still loving the clean, easy to understand websites being produced at the moment but the trend is shifting a little towards Material Design.
Everyone is wanking on about it, including Google describing it as some kind of Disney movie magic. “Our material is grounded in tactile reality, inspired by our study of paper and ink, yet open to imagination and magic.”
(insert image here http://www.google.co.uk/design/spec/material-design/introduction.html)
Basically this means having some bold colour highlights throughout your website and also using ‘ghost buttons’ which are like normal buttons but less in your face. They kind of float over the top of the background image of the website and only turn a solid colour when you scroll over them.
Which brings us to our second trend…
2) Full background images and large/bold typography
With the recent improvements in responsive design (guess what point three is about you guys!) web designers are slowly falling back in love with large images on sites, especially if they want to make an impact on their homepage. Couple this with large, bold typography and you have a recipe for deliciousness… for web designers that is. Which we are, which is why we love it… CARRY ON – NOTHING TO SEE HERE. Except this gorgeous example of a website using the full background image trend.
(insert image here http://blackmilkclothing.com/)
3) Responsive web design
Making sure your website is able to be viewed quickly and efficiently on ALL devices is SUPER IMPORTANT! This means, mobiles, tablets, laptops and desktops. Why is it so important? Because 80% of people are now using their smartphone to search the web, that’s why, and with other non-pc/laptop device internet usage on the rise responsive websites are where it’s at this year. You’d be silly not to have one.
http://www.smartinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/desktop-vs-mobile-most-popular-devices-2015-550×719.png
4) Hidden Menus
Look, we don’t like keeping secrets, but we do like being sneaky sometimes. Hidden menus scratches this itch we have to keep people on our website a little longer going ‘Where’s the menu button!?’ It’s sneaky, and we like it but it’s also a very nice trend that keeps welcome pages decluttered which ties in nicely with flat and material design (refer to point one about that, unless you read it already… what the hell – refer to it again!)
(insert image here http://www.kikki-k.com/)
For younger web users, hidden menus aren’t so much of a problem, they’ll simply find the ‘ghost button’ that says Menu and click on it revealing the array of other pages they can navigate to.
Some older web users may be confused… but lets be honest, that seems to be quite common and we’re sure they’ll find some young whippersnapper to help them figure it out.
5) Card Design
We think this is pretty self explanatory but we’ll explain it anyway. Basically websites use flash card type displays to show customers a quick glimpse of a lot of their products at once. Pinterest is a really good example of a website that uses card design as are a lot of e-commerce stores one of our favs being Converse!
(insert iamge here http://www.converse.com.au/)
So there you have it, five web trends that we think are important so we hope you’ll see a bunch of them this year to prove us right.