Gone are the days when overly glossy web pages defined modern web design. Year 2010 is a new era for web design. Here are the trends for web design!
1. Memorable and delightful
To design for delight is to make a design memorable and remarkable. Attractive things work better to create a memorable, therefore imagery works best. By adding small touches to your site, it makes your web design stand out just a little bit more. E.g. creating little pop ups as you scroll through a page as been by bountybev:
Having things out of place gives a webpage a sense of uniqueness and diversity e.g. having images that are on a slight angle also make a web design memorable
2. Keypress Navigation
As designers are making their designs more responsive, one way to make a web design more interactive is to incorporate key press navigation. The idea of key press navigation is to allow users to use keyboard shortcuts to do tedious tasks such as pressing a next button. An example would be Mad-ar.ch (Marc Anton Dahmen) website whose navigation is quite advanced using keyboards to go to different pages on a website and using other keys to scale and move through images.
3. Print Design Influence
Although print is slowly becoming outdated, it still lives in the digital world. Many websites today have been designed based on the rules in print designs. Print inspired web designs include striking headings, multi column text, highlighted quotations, indented text, supporting imager, sidenotes, footnotes and a strong sense of typography.
3. Horizontal Designs
Websites with horizontal scroll bars have been more difficult to navigate because the mouse was designers for vertical scrolling. But now with the emergence of multi-touch devices forces us to rethink the usability of such designs. Plug-in such as Scrollable and jScrollHorizontalPane make this happen.
4. Strong Rich Typography
Typography has always been a strong element to web pages and now in 2010 they are more dominant than ever. Using embedded fonts makes a web design more memorable also so be sure to include different font faces and large type sizes. There has also been a push to use serif fonts supported with large imagery. Within the typography, consider using different colours to the basic black. E.g. using a deep blue instead of black gives a page more depth and appeal.
