By Teddy Hunt
The Internet is continuously involving, and people are constantly finding new ways to attract others to their website. Design trends are about as shifty as fashion, so it’s important to keep your website updated with the latest that web design has to offer. With that said, here are seven of the most popular web design trends spicing things up in 2014.
Funky Typography
Funky as in experimental, not funky as in overly complex and unreadable. Graphic designers are having as much fun as ever playing around with fonts and injecting them with flare. These fonts are spicier than your average serif or san-serif like Times New Roman or Helvetica. As the web further expands and more people take to creating their own websites, the need to branch out and come up with unique fonts that stand out is more important than ever before.
Super-Sized Navigation Menus
There’s been a plethora of fancy navigation menus designed, tested, and approved over the past few years, with mobile responsive design (we’ll get to that later) and HTML5/CSS3 influencing that. But the most recent trend seems to involve super-sized menus that expand to huge blocks of content and links. These menus are commonly found on websites that publish great volumes of unique content in high volumes. Although it takes up a lot of space on the page, it provides visitors a broader choice to navigate your website.
Mobile-First Design
The purpose of mobile-first design is to develop your website so that it has a responsive layout that’s accessible by mobile users without sacrificing quality. Essentially, you want to cut of the excess fluff and keep the critical elements. From this perspective, it’s easier to scale up your website’s design to devices that have wider screens. Mobile-first design emphasizes the mobile experience and becomes the foundation for the entire layout. Just make sure that you’re not committing mobile web design mistakes when designing your website.
More Videos
Website visitors are spending less time reading text and more time watching videos and looking at pictures (infographics). With that in mind, it’s time to trash the boring blurbs about what your company can offer and showcase that point in video format (don’t make them too long, though).
Not only is this media format more popular today, but it’s also easily sharable on social media, resulting in more views and greater brand awareness.
Endless Scrolling
Guess what? Scrolling through an in-depth website is easier and faster than clicking through 25 different links to get access to the information you want — and graphic designers are noticing.
These websites aren’t cluttered with content on long scrolling pages, either.
Designers use new website design techniques to format and organize the content in a way that’s easy to read and comprehend. Endless scrolling design can change the layout and design of the page as your scroll further, making you forget you’re scrolling through a lot of information to begin with.
Simple and Subtle Color Schemes
The days of eye-popping graphics, complex animations, and crazy color schemes are coming to an end — at least for now. If you’re a smart graphic designer, you’ll use one or two colors instead in the future. One of the more popular trends today is to use a single bright color and a single clean background color like red, teal, or orange (including images or black and white text on top). Not only is this effect minimalistic, but it’s user-friendly.
3D Transition Effects
Whether it’s in animated image galleries, elements, or navigation menus, 3D animations are becoming more popular by the day. You can create 3D effects using jQuery; although, CSS3 has slowly caught up. Unfortunately, not all browsers support these types of animations, so designers avoid using too many on one page. Check out these 3D animated code examples to work from if you want to give a shot.
What website design trends do you expect in the near future? Have you implemented any that make your website stand out better than before? Leave a comment and share your thoughts on the subject.
Photo Credit: Viktor Hertz via Compfight cc
