So it’s the 5th day into 2014 and again it also the start of us to look ahead to see what kind of web design trends we can look forward to as we can seen that these trends tend to be around for a few years while as many of these other “trends” may be around a limited time.

Below are some trends and predictions that are just a few of my own thoughts and to help you get ahead of these trends.

Flat Design

For many years we have been used the latest in CSS3 to manipulate our designs to jump off the page but during 2013 we have seen many of us shift towards using flat design to give our designs the bare essentials  where we seen blocks of colours, tiles, strong lines, basic icons and creative typography to create a much simpler user experience.

Awesome Typography

It’s great to see designers has already started using this trend last year but I think we will seen many more designers experimenting with typeface to allow our site to give more personality than rather than using the plain old and boring standard serif and san-serif fonts in our sites.

Interactive Infographics

We have seen infographics in print form for many years but as of lately we’ve seen this trend becoming into a interactive form for visitors to gain information that relates to the product or services

Infinite Scrolling

Infinite scrolling was first seen on sites such as Pinterest and since then we seen many designers recreate this feature of infinite scrolling as one of its core advantages. As it allows any content to scroll smoothly without any interruption.

Parallax Scrolling

We’ve seen the parallax scrolling trends in video games for years to it provides depth in 2D games but as of lately many of us have seen designers embracing this more in websites as in doing this effect can be awesome, the use of fixed backgrounds to make layers on the site move at different rates can create a unique, engaging experience and is great for storytelling.

Responsive Design

This is really a trend anymore as this is a necessity for every web designer as this necessity will develop even further in 2014 and we must fully expect some of the current techniques to become ‘best practice’ for the next coming years.

Limiting Social Icons

It doesn’t matter if you have a huge online presence but having too many social icons can damage your homepage, It is just better that you  just stick to the top 3 social icons that you want to be placed on your homepage.

Large Background Images

Having a website background that is a large, full-width image can help take the lead in the overall layout of the website as it can keep the design clean.

More Retina Ready Websites

As retina displays has double the amount of pixels we will probably see the increase of designers willing to embracing this and move toward giving us simpler pages but with higher resolution images.