Website design incorporates using your own creativity to create wonderful websites, either by order, or by designing templates for the less needy crowd. While it incorporates the knowledge of a website designer, web design is based upon creating your own website, running it and doing your own maintenance. This requires a bit more work and involvement, while you are aiming at attracting a variety of crowds towards your legacy. With this in mind, we’ve included a couple of web design trends to expect in 2016.
Richer Animations
Animations are basically used as tools to attract users to a site, making the experience more entertaining and interactive. Adding animation everywhere, however, can not only slow down the users’ browsers, but may also make a website look overwhelming and generally unappealing. The key here is to refer to your site’s personality, while making animations click with what your site has in offer. With this in mind, animations can be divided into two groups:
- Small scale animations, which include spinners, loading bars and hover tools, which do not require user interaction
- Large scale animations, which are based on interaction and designed to make the user’s experience better.
Animation techniques include loading animations, hover animations, non scrolling, slideshows, galleries, motion animation and background animations.
Flat Design
Although it has been around for quite some time now, flat design isn’t showing signs of going away anytime soon. Based on minimalism, here is a couple of future trends to look forward to in 2016, when it comes to flat design:
- Simple typography, with simple surfaces that will help ensuring that the text is readable.
- Ghost buttons are outlined, clickable links that change when hovered over, which will provide functionality, without the inconvenience of distraction from the UX
- Long shadows will bring more depth to flat design
- Vibrant colors to provide liveliness to the designs
- Minimalism will cut down on the number of elements in the design, to make a fresh, uncluttered, seamless design.
Clip Art
Pre-made images, used to illustrate any medium, clip art has been around in many personal, as well as commercial projects. Although this technology has been around for a while now, many providers plan on incorporating a new tactic in selling these. iCLIPART coupons, for example, have already been available for some time now. There are millions of royalty-free images, web graphics, photos, fonts, animations and sounds in offer on the internet that designers can use.
Material Design
Now this technique is said to be the richer future of flat design. Using shadow effects and concepts of movement and depth, it is used to come up with designs, which will appear more realistic to the user. The point here is coming up with a modernistic design that is cleaner and adds up to a site’s aesthetic value. Most of these, however benefit from a minimalistic look, which not only makes it more convenient for weaker user machines, but also simpler and quicker to get into. Intended to provide great UI and UX across all devices, JavaScript will be incorporated to make things simpler and add the look and feel of material design to websites
Responsive Design
Owing to the rise in trend of mobile internet usage, responsive web design has experienced a growth in popularity over the course of past couple of years. A simple and cheap way to build a functional mobile-friendly site, this type of design has to be run in a certain way in order to allow maximum functionality.
- Use responsive images, defined using a percentage
- Ebb away from using CSS image and JavaScript image loading using the ‘display:none’ tag, as this downloads the image to the device, slowing down the mobile page access functionality.
- Use conditional loading with JavaScript, seeing as how mobile phones still aren’t powerful enough to run all of the components used on a desktop site.
- Use Responsive and Server Side
- In order to effectively optimize and measure each site, performance testing needs to be incorporated.
These are only some of easily-predictable trends for web design to look out for in the upcoming year. However, we are sure that the 2016 has a lot more in store for us in terms of this area of expertise, as well as many other branches of technology.
