By Jim Clanin
Designing a new website, or putting a fresh spin on an old one? It’s not always clear how to improve upon your design. How do you create a modern, but lasting, design?
Right now, the overarching trend of the design world is simplicity, and these 5 design trends can help you streamline and simplify your website, refreshing your design and drawing your visitor to what’s most important about your business. Talk with your web design company about incorporating some of these design trends into your project.
Colors: Bold is Beautiful
Most people look at their app icons and see a blue, blue, and more blue. But Apple’s new design will change all that. Instead of color conformity, Apple is dramatically increasing the range of acceptable colors. And we all know that what Apple does will soon be followed by the rest of the tech industry. So if you don’t want your app (or web design) to disappear, consider some bold colors. Blue may imply reliability, but colorful design can suggest that something fresh is afoot.
Icons: Flat and Thin is In
I hesitate to use the word flat, because it can suggest simple, or boring, and the current trend in icon design is anything but. However, if you’ve ever had to edit yourself, you know that restraint is a fine art, and elegance is anything but easy. iOS7 will force designers to create clean icons, as excessive shadowing and beveling will look tacky and outdated on the streamlined interface. Minimalist icons in a range of colors, and consistent across different platforms, are on their way in.
Typography: Built for the Web
In the past, web fonts were nothing more than pixelated print fonts, and the beauty of some of their distinctive design elements was lost in digitization. Now, designers are creating fonts designed specifically for the web, and for the huge variety of screens that we now use to access the web. The propagation of web-friendly fonts presents web designers with worlds of possibilities for making content as appealing as the idea it communicates. Talk with your web design company about what web-friendly fonts are available for your project.
Data: Integrated and Interactive
Data used to be presented through third party software and uploaded onto a website. Now, web designers can make data visualizations an integrated part of their web design; you can see how many options are available through D3.js in the photo above. That means users can interact with visualizations in a completely new way, and the data is crawlable by search engines. Data can now be a central part of your web design, instead of an afterthought.
Parallax: Creating an Experience
If you aren’t familiar with the term, you’ve probably experienced it; Parallax scrolling is an animation trick in which the background image scrolls by slower than the text in the foreground. This trend is definitely a hot one, but it’s a tricky thing to get it right. If you do it wrong, your website can look tacky and feel bewildering for visitors. But if you do it well, you can create an immersive experience for your visitor and create visual cues that make your website that much more impactful. As is often the case with tech, less is more. Use parallax scrolling judiciously.
Do you love these trends, or hate them? What other web design trends have you picked up on this year?
