With a quick look back at Web Design 2014 you’ll see mobile, HTML 5, scrolling, micro UX, flat UI and the king of design principles, minimalism, were all the rage.
For what’s headed your way in Web Design 2015, read on…
Embrace the mobile and choose one page layout to deliver a web project on iPhone, tablet or any other mobile device in the most optimal way. With one page layout you view the entire site without clicking on links to visit additional pages. You scroll instead, because everything is on a single page. This is the navigation technique requiring less page loading, less flowing data, less dynamic interaction with the end result, a smoother user experience.
Responsive design has become the new standard for web design over the past few years. 2015 is no exception. Responsive web design and mobile friendly websites were made for each other.
iA’s Oliver Reichenstein rightly said “Web design is 95% typography”. Web typography isn’t limited to the use of fonts on your website. Rather, it’s the art of creating and manipulating the typefaces and white spaces to enhance communication and readability.
Make your site stand out by prominently displaying great content. Ghost buttons are pretty simple, are becoming more widely used, are minimal, stylish, very easy to create, and usually combined with a cool and simple hover animation. What caught on in 2014 will expand in 2015.
Scalable Vector Graphics may be the best format for responsive web design. It’s an ideal fit for flat and material design. The SVG advantage is its vector format which maintains sharpness after scaling. It can be implemented with CSS or JavaScript and can be used to create animations. With SVG, web designers focus on their design and spend less time thinking about different screen resolutions.
Websites relying on an arrangement that resembles cards or tiles are usually very simple while presenting the viewer with as much information as possible. Card design works well with advertising products or displaying a portfolio. Social media giants such as Spotify, Pinterest, Twitter and Google have caught on and are using the tile-like arrangement.
Incorporating Skeuomorphism into Flat Design is Material Design’s raison d’etre. The everyday objects and interactions we know in the real world are thrown into the sleek minimalism and mobile-friendliness of Flat. This results in an intuitive and device-friendly design style, convenient for both the machine and the user. The best of both worlds.
As the mobile web continues to grow and web design continues to skew in the direction of a more effective and enjoyable mobile experience, scrolling will continue to dominate clicking. It’s more intuitive, easier to do, cuts down on load times and allows for more dynamic interaction to take place between the user and the website. Parallax scrolling first became popular in early 2014, but look for it on more and more websites in 2015. With parallax scrolling you can create flexible and unique web pages that will surprise your visitors with effectiveness and convenience. It works especially well in creating single page websites or storytelling.
Microinteractions are contained experiences or moments within a module on a website that revolve around a single use case, for example the email signup box that pops up on the website and wiggles back and forth on the screen, giving a playful personality to an otherwise static graphic. Microinteractions promote an increase in user engagement — in the case above, more email signups. You’ll see this theory begin to permeate web design in 2015. As developers begin to think along these lines you’ll see more WordPress themes and plugins.
Look for cookies rehabilitation in 2015, just as certain popups have made a classier return with better design and best practices in place. The technique of using cookies to display certain content to repeat visitors can be used far more creatively than simply displaying spam and relentlessly up-selling.
Contact Position² for professionally designed web pages to stay ahead of the trends!
