There are many elements to a great design. A sure-fire way to make your site look clean, contemporary and up-to-date is to jump on the bandwagon and copy a trend that’s being used by the top brands.
In this article, we’ll take a look at web-design trends that are likely to dominate 2014. They may not all be entirely new, but they are all highly likely to reach mass-usage this year.
And if you think we’ve missed out any key trends, please feel free to leave your tips in the comments below.
Flat Design
Flat design has been around for a while. In fact, Dieter Rams’ designs since the ‘70s follow many of the same principles. Said principles have been in use in digital for the last few years, with Windows 8 as the stand-out example.
However, it really didn’t reach trend status until apple released iOS 7; now a significant proportion of the PSDs we’re sent by our clients have dropped the drop shadows and gradients.
Flat design is non-flashy; the text is concise and to the point; the buttons and links are clear and noticeable. This more minimalist approach can help users easily find what they’re looking for. Making websites user-friendly should be on top of every company’s agenda, and flat design, when used well, can go some way to meeting these requirements.
Responsive
We delivered many responsive site-designs throughout 2013, and the tools and methods to build them have matured in a short space of time.
It’s difficult to say that this is a ‘trend’ in a way (or limit its influence to one year) as it such an important development. Retailer John Lewis recently reported that over a third of their web traffic on Christmas day 2013 was from mobile and tablet devices.
That said, it’ll still be one of the most important factors being considered in site design in 2014. We’d even go so far as to say that any site built in 2014 that doesn’t consider mobile (which means at least some responsive too) is a failure.
Video backgrounds
With more powerful web-browsing devices and faster internet speeds, online video is inevitably becoming more important. This is moving beyond an embedded YouTube player on a page, and seeing video being more deeply embedded into the site experience.
This trend probably isn’t suitable to serve all types of projects, but we still reckon it’ll be huge in 2014. The Variousways website is a perfect example to showcase what can be achieved with this: http://www.variousways.com/
Richer content
Users have higher expectations from websites they visit nowadays. Providing richer content experience will be vital in 2014 to ensure companies can engage well with the audience and continue to attract a high volume of traffic.
A combination of audio, video and animations – along with many other digital elements – ‘richer content’ allows web designers to provide visitors with an extraordinary experience. The Kennedy and Oswald website provides a great example of the richer content experience: http://kennedyandoswald.com/
Author: Deepak Ark.
