Design in general is always evolving and changing. From the dull days of boring, spotty websites to the age of color and excitement— web design evolves quickly in a few short years. There’s no doubt that design trends, styles and techniques are changing rapidly, and that as designers, it’s our responsibility at Dockery Design to keep up and build on this change.
Here are some design trends that we’ve seen over the past year. As we head towards the end of the year and on into 2010, our team will keep a watchful eye on how web design shakes out.
1. Website Headers with Extremely Large, Focal Imagery
A lot of designs have returned to a single, powerful image at the heart of the website which serves as part of the design and attempts to communicate the intended brand image.
This exciting banner is seen at www.the360woman.com
2. Heavy use of Georgia
Many websites have adopted Georgia. The font itself is a pretty good for standard text in content at anywhere between 10-14px, and even serves well for titles at larger sizes, providing a strong serif look with elegance.
3. Minimalism
The minimalistic train has made yet another stop on the web. Less graphics, less text means more content, more space. As more websites have begun to adopt this minimalistic approach, we are proud to see that customers are getting to the specific information they want is a quick fashion without getting confused by lengthy and irrelevant info on the homepage.
Typography may not be everything with this piece, but you get the idea
4. A Mix of Vibrant Colors
As the web moves on, people are becoming a lot more adventurous with their use of color and they combinations they create. The site below is a typical example on a beautiful, lush, vibrant design with strong use of blues and greens.
As we can see, design in general is making a very quick advance in style. About 5-10 years ago, you would have never seen anything like this, and in many cases, the sites of yester-year were plain text.
Predictions
Now, where do we see the design world in the next few years – well let me make my predictions. First of all, we’re seeing an ever-increasing number of websites adopting what is called ‘AJAX’ technology (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), albeit a coding-side development it will help radically change the design trends of the future. Remember when flash websites were all the rage? Well, it’s becoming more and more possible to build an almost flash-like website with lush, cool animations using AJAX instead.
The less is more concept is still a core ideal that has been developed over the last few years in the web design industry, after moving away from initially heavy graphical websites, but I also suspect for the majority of sites to hit in the middle, and be sites which are quite minimal, but still take advantage of large imagery in certain key parts of the design.
There’s also a great deal of pressure on all designs to be accessible and usable. This means that we’ll see a lot more contrasting colors and a lot less “blending” in terms of both design and content.
What trends are you spotting, and what trends are you expecting in 2010? Let us know!
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This year has been a little on the boor. Hope next year will bring the return of some real style
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