We are already in the new year and it’s always a great time to get a revamp for your website and get it ready to face the new year with a new style. With many of these trends tend to be around for a few years but with saying that we sometimes seen that “trends” fade slowly away.
So below I present you what could be some of the most possible web design trends that we see to do the rounds in this year. I would love to hear your though on what your predictions of design trends we could see in 2015.
Responsive
Responsive Web Design has become the new rule of the designing arena, websites are becoming more and more mobile friendly but with the increase of smart watches, TVs and home appliances being use, definition of responsive design is expanding rapidly and it will take more than some merely changes to make them work on desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
As each “new” platform such as the introduction of smart watches (which I will go into detail in the next paragraph) has its own unique challenges, tablets and smartphones have very familiar interaction systems and the main problem is to ensure that the content is appropriately sized and easy to navigate.
So let’s take smart watches, the navigation system has to be completely rethought to accommodate how we use the device. Watches won’t be able to use site design that we see on smart phone and a site optimised for desktops won’t necessarily work when we viewed it on a smartTV.
Ghost Buttons
First for those who don’t know what “Ghost Buttons” are:
When you see those transparent & empty buttons contains to have a basic shape form, such as a rectangle. which are generally bordered by a very thin line and with the internal section consists of plain text printed in a light font.
These buttons are sometimes referred being “empty” of “hollow” buttons, and tend to be bigger than standard coloured buttons and the attribute ‘ghost’ is due to the fact that, although they are transparent as phantoms but they immediately will grab the users attention almost in a way that a ghost story can transfix your gaze.
I would think this prediction will be usefully as they are minimal, stylish, and with the subtle hover animation they’re a delight to use daily
Less Clicking, More Scrolling
As the mobile web sill continues to grow along with web design, the direction of a more effective and enjoyable mobile experience, scrolling will continue to dominate clicking as it’s more intuitive, easier to do, cuts down on load times and will allow for more dynamic interaction to take place between the website and the user.
Site Performance
While this is not strictly a design trend, developers will going to need to focus on building the skill set that needed to make their websites render faster and faster. We have already see this happening over on at Hosting Companies with the Storage changing for Hard Drives into Solid State Drives to help with the site loading faster sometimes 50% faster. But on the Developer side we will see that there’s plenty that can be done in the CSS and JavaScript build out that can assist in making things run more efficiently.
SVG/SVG Animations
One of the other trend I can see is the use of more is the use of SVG graphics. As this is a vector format it works pretty well on most modern browsers.
As with we see with SVG all your assets will be more crisper on whatever screen resolution you are on and with the SVG format its has other nice things which is the ability to embed media-queries to create for example responsive logos that would nicely adapt to screen size and the ability to be animated as well, so we can kinda say goodbye to PNGs.
Full screen background images and videos
The full screen trend of showing images and videos has been a trend for a while but it will grow even bigger as we will see that more people are seeing videos is just a great way to reflect the purpose and uniqueness of your site, so don’t hesitate to make a large beautiful image or a video on your homepage and by adding an aesthetic touch to your site with elegant images and a prominent tag line and probably adding a ghost button along with an elegant image is the winning recipe for a unique website.
The Evolution of Flat Design
Image Credit: Google Design
Flat design has achieved a lot of momentum over the last year or so, and its appear to have staying power into the start of 2015. However, it might be possible that as it is a concept, flat design has been growing up fast into material design, but what is material design?
Material design is something that Google unveiled last year as their new direction for mobile and design in general. the “Material” of it all is to quote their brief
A material metaphor is the unifying theory of rationalised space and a system of motion. Our material is grounded in tactile reality, inspired by our study of paper and ink, yet open to imagination and magic.
We have already seen material design as it been designed to be used on Android new operating system. but as it is Google new direction to design mobile websites. However, material design has become one of the hottest trend to follow as a large number of websites have already implemented this design principles into their layout. Material design is nothing more than having a flat design with some simple effects including gradients, layering, and animations.
Bigger Emphasis on Typography
Image Credit: Adobe Typekit
Typography has developed so much in the past few years. as we see traditional web type-kits that allowed for beautiful fonts and typefaces to be used on websites sometimes been expensive. Meaning that sites leaning heavily on typographic design tended to be required to have a larger budgets leaving most of the smaller guys out.
But its changing as Type kits are becoming more affordable such as Typekit being a part of Adobe Creative Cloud plans or having free typekit that Google Fonts has to offer, that means it will allow the small guys to join in the fun and freedomfor designers to workon bringing their typography skills to the web design table.
