Our Web Design Forecast for 2016
As a Dallas web design company that’s fully committed to providing our clients with the best digital marketing services we can offer, we are equally committed to keeping our community updated on the latest news, trends, and forecasts in the industry. We offer premium digital marketing services — SEO, social media services, web support, IT support, web hosting, video production, brand management, and much more — and today we’re sharing what changes we hope to see in web design this year.
Your website’s design is the first thing your visitors will see. While it’s equally important that you have a well-built UI, a sound SEO structure, highly functional features, and reliable web hosting, the overall look creates your brand’s initial impression on your potential customers.
In the recent years, we have been bombarded with most of the following web design trends:
- Flat design
- Minimalism
- Hero images
- Interactive infographics
- Hamburger icon and menu
- CSS animation
- Content sliders
- Endless scrolling
- Single-page websites
- Tile-based layouts
- Frontend frameworks
- Responsive design
- Automated popups
- Experimental typography
- Hipster layouts
- Designs meant to impress other designers rather than address the website owner’s needs
- Designs that echo several other website designs so they all look almost identical in an effort to be trendy
Some of these and more can use a huge update, such as:
Calligraphic typography – With the rise of calligraphy as a personal activity, web design may adopt unique handwritten and painted fonts as a more personalized approach to standard typography.
Mobile UX Design – Where photos and images were mainly used as decorative elements, text, graphical elements, and CSS will now be used to enhance user experience with mobile devices. This means the overall website design will be influenced by how a user will respond to it, and not the other way around.
Material design – This is a more layered alternative to flat design elements, using 3D visual cues that simulate natural texture and movement, but accommodates the same ease of use as flat design does.
Modular design – Instead of designing full pages, individual elements can be designed separately to avoid messing up the rest of the page’s features. These elements can function as standalone components or work seamlessly alongside other modules within the page.
Less scrolling – This is still up for debate because of content-rich websites. But websites that have relied on endless scrolling in the last few years may want to reconsider switching to a no-scroll or low-scroll layout.
More images, less text – To keep up with viewers’ attention span, more websites might use high quality images or graphical elements and less text. In fact, much of the text that will be embedded in the website would be mainly for SEO and UX purposes.
More content, less ads – With ads visibly disrupting the user’s experience in websites, blogs, social networks, and apps, it’s high time that designers return the focus on content-centered layouts that make provisions for, but not prioritize attention to ads.
Client-centered design – It’s extremely easy to build a website with the intention of showing it off in design communities, or to showcase one’s skills. But when designing for a client, we hope to see more web designers giving high priority to the client’s business needs and goals, instead of stroking one’s own aesthetic ego.
These are just a few changes and improvements that we hope would be more prominent in the web design industry this year. Trends are great for establishing current standards in design, but we feel that they shouldn’t be the end goal of designers; rather, they should be used as starting points for creating layouts and elements that highlight each website’s uniqueness.
