Current Trends in Web Design
As web designers, we have to be on top of current trends in order to be at our design peak. We need to learn to apply them and then learn to grow them so we can challenge ourselves. Below is a list of my top 5 trends of the moment.
1. Responsive Web Design
Since the market is just flooded with various sized devices, it is only natural that web design and development embraces and adapts to these new screen resolutions. The best and easiest way to cater for all these is to have a responsive website, which basically means it responds and resizes to the screen of your device.
You can play around with your browser by making it very thin and seeing at which intervals the web design changes. Previously I was only ever expanding my browser windows to see how far a background image could stretch, now I have a habit of contracting windows to see how small a website can go!
Have a play with these two websites: FoodSense and ForeFathersGroup.
2. HTML5 and Animation
If I could have a tie for first place, it would be with this trend. I am constantly being blown away by what HTML can do now and am forever 'right clicking' to make sure it is built in HTML5. Granted this is still up and coming as some browsers do not support it, but i still think it's super fun - look at this phone rotate around your screen!
ZeptoLab also recreated the much loved iPhone game 'Cut the Rope' in HTML5 which can now be played in your browser. This is definitely a trend that will continue on strongly. It's giving flash a run for its money.
3. Circles
This trend was something that snuck under my radar until I realised how much I was itching to design using circles. This is because CSS3 is now capable of making circles without the need for images, hence the reason why they're popping up everywhere, even in one of our latest designs. Circles are such a nice alternative to the rounded rectangle and as you can see from the link above their use is not limited to just spotlight special deals.
4. Mega menus
First we had the mega footer, now we have the mega menu - which I love. I think it gives designers more flexibility in terms of space and real estate available. It provides a more structured and easier user experience for navigating around a website. Another thing a mega menu does is give more room to advertising or feature spots, have a look at the way Clinique incorporate these into their mega menu.
5. Live custom font
As a designer I sometimes feel like I have a love/hate relationship with fonts. I can like how Arial looks in one size but hate it in another, which proves to be quite annoying and stressful when you have a whole homepage to design but you are fixated on the size of a plain web friendly font. However (thankfully!) in the past year or so the industry has been experimenting with a larger array of dynamic fonts. With the assistances of Google Web Fonts and Typekit we can now use live fonts that helps us twofold, we can have a pretty design and it's SEO friendly - everybody wins. Take a look at these two sites and have a guess which are live fonts and which are graphics:
