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Web Design Trends
- webbruce 14y agoAnother hot one growing is flat design which has little gradients and beveled effects. I made a Dribbble bucket here to see examples: http://dribbble.com/bcackerman/buckets/82543-Flat http://dribbble.com/bcackerman/buckets/82543-Flat
- pjmo 14y agoNice bucket, I'm a big fan of flat design. The guys from layervault put up a good post recently http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/32267022219/flat-interface-design http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/32267022219/flat-interface...
- eduardordm 14y agoReal nice. You are ahead of 2012.
- citizenblr 14y agoThanks for the compliment. Very glad to see such a lively discussion.
- dmix 14y agoAndroid is utilizing this style on their new apps/menus. It looks great.
- rmrfrmrf 14y agoGoogle in general has been moving to this style. See also: Gmail, Google Docs
- milesokeefe 14y agoTheir A/B Youtube redesign as well.
- mark_story 14y agoAs is microsoft in all products using Metro style interfaces. I think the rise of flat is partly a reaction to gradients being everywhere and on everything for the past few years. It also creates a visual difference between apple and their competitors.
- aziari 14y agoBeautiful work. What's your criteria for when to use flat and not?
- blehn 14y agoNot the OP but I'll tell you my approach, as someone who prefers a "flat" style: I think of dimension (and texture) as one of the tools in the design toolbox, along with proximity, alignment, proportion, color, shape, and others. These tools allow us to create hierarchy, affordance, focus/highlights, contrast, legibility and other design paradigms that hopefully result in usable, visually pleasing design. The effectiveness of each tool depends on the design objective (using color or proportion to highlight an element might be more effective than simply using alignment). In a minimalist approach, I like to work with the tools in "layers", in a specific order, and in quantities as small as possible. First, I begin with alignment and proximity — positioning elements. The challenge is to create something usable and attractive using only those tools. Sometimes, it's just not possible, so I'll move on to proportion, then color, then shape. I generally find that dimension and texture are unnecessary, so I leave them in the toolbox. Sometimes, perhaps because there's a high density of elements in the design, one element (button, dialogue, header) may need additional contrast or focus, at which point I'll consider adding some depth.
- runemadsen 14y agoI'm not sure I would call this "Flat Design" a new design style. You see minimalism and a perfect balance between content and form in most mature design fields, and I think this is more of a sign that web design is not being dictated by trends anymore. If you want "Flat Design", take a look at the 1981 Xerox Star.
- navs 14y agoOff-topic but aside from Dribbble buckets, what other tools do you folks use for collecting interesting design patterns?
- wmeredith 14y agoPinterest is great for this. Pinboard and Flickr as well.
- dholowiski 14y agoThe site seems to be down, does anyone have a mirror?
- photorized 14y ago502 Bad Gateway
- webskyter 14y agofixed :)
- sachinmonga 14y agoMissing the biggest one: 3 offset columns to display entries, a la Pinterest.
- jamesbritt 14y agoHow did "2012" get in the post title? I noticed some of these trends are carry-overs from past years (focus on simplicity, the use of large photo backgrounds, the emphasis on typography, for example). But in re-checking the site I didn't see any claim that these are somehow trends of 2012; in fact, they say, "Let’s take a moment to look around some trends we witnessed in last couple years."
- jordanmoore_ 14y agoFor teh SEOS.
- jamesbritt 14y agoI see the post has now been re-titled.
- arrowgunz 14y agoIt should be "JavaScript" not "Java Script" in the list of tags displayed on top in the technical category. Edit: Just correcting to help, not mocking.
- BaconJuice 14y agovery interesting, Thank you for sharing.
- ef4 14y agoThe first item, long single page designs, has always been a favorite of skilled marketers. It goes back even to pre-web snailmail marketing. In comparison tests, longer copy almost always wins. You keep offering more and more reasons to buy, and you keep converting more and more readers. This relates to one of the basic observations about selling: people don't like to change their minds. They won't spontaneously go from "no" to "yes". But if you offer a new piece of information, they can change their mind without admitting they were "wrong" before. Every new piece of information, or new story, is another opportunity for them to get to "yes". Obviously, the copy also needs to be good.
- anotherbadlogin 14y agoSingle-page is good, but the item right after that is not: "photo backgrounds." Yeah, that's just what we need as more people are browsing on mobile devices with unreliable (and compromised) download speeds. Not to mention that some providers recompress images, potentially making them look like ass.
- jiggy2011 14y agoI notice this too, but it seems to fly in the face of a lot of people who say "make the page short , people don't want to read". Case in point a lot of startup websites that have one sentence of huge text saying "X let's you do Y with Z" and then a gigantic "SIGN UP" button and nothing else on the page. There's also a lot of pages that seem to do a halfway house and provide a lot of images for re-enforcement. Like this one: http://www.apple.com/uk/ipad-mini/overview/ http://www.apple.com/uk/ipad-mini/overview/
- losvedir 14y ago> In comparison tests, longer copy almost always wins. Really? I'd love to see A/B results somewhere of this, as it doesn't agree with my experience. Maybe it depends on industry. Or, maybe sufficiently good copy beats out shorter designs, but most people just can't generate that kind of copy. (Though it sounds like we're getting to a New True Scotsman a bit.) When my start-up did an A/B test of our homepage, we found less content won out. Also 37 signals did their series on optimization, and had strong results[1] that shorter beat out long form, too. [1] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-testing-part-3-final http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-tes...
- dilipray 14y agoThe first thing to remember is not to change the entire design at once.unless it's totally horrible. The prototype should never be better than than the final version because what we try to give is awesome design which work awesome as a static version but when it come to dynamic view developers keep changing things.that will completely change everything you need to change accordingly sometimes people think that single page apps are better.it's true in some cases but not in all the cases trello is the best example it can be a single page app but they dint.pjax is what you can really use for dynamic design but still when it comes to micro-blog or blog the ajax will just fine. but you should really try pjax technic for mega apps. i work on django so thats what i suggest for others using pjax is awesome
- hkon 14y agoWho are responsible for these trends? I'm sure many people have come up with designs like this before it got trending? Apple?
- georgemcbay 14y agoYes, every design trend can be traced straight back to Apple. Nobody who doesn't work for Apple is capable of innovating new design trends. And after they leave Apple they lose the Apple magic and are just non-innovative designers again. (/s) On a more serious note, IMO Apple's wild ride into skeuomorphism is already starting to look dated, IMO. Their web designs don't suffer from this as much as their native apps do, but whenever I see a new app with a background that's brushed chrome or leather or some form of wood grain, it looks a bit stale in terms of design. Of course YMMV, this is a mostly subjective thing, but in terms of overall software visual design, I'll take what MS is doing with Metro or what Google has been doing with Android from ICS+ over the Apple texture-everything approach any day.
- hkon 14y agoYes, you mention apple, google and microsoft. I am under the impression that designers work on accepted (by big/famous companies/personalities) designs within the design community. Are these trends simply designers daring to be original, or can we trace these new trending designs back to a single influential source? Or maybe does the design need to exist on said influential sources for shotcallers to dare say OK ship it!
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- Djonckheere 14y agoThe last item cited, typography, could hardly be seen as a design 'trend' itself. That's like saying a designer's use of colour or negative space are regarded as stylistically in vogue today but may have been less prevalent or even nonexistent in use at points in the past. Typography is a core element of design. Period. It's not something that falls in and out of favor as a trend.
- 001sky 14y agoWhile this is true, I think you're missing the point. Typography as a primary graphic (al-la-street art / grafitti) is actually a distinct notion. Seperate from idea from notion of typography as a digital variant of calligrophy, etc. The latter has always been an element of publishing/desktop publishing and design (steve jobs, etc). The former has not.
- Djonckheere 14y agoRegardless, typography as a primary graphic element——and to be clear, we are talking about the Web——is not really a trend in my mind.