Design trends often comprise several years, but web design is quickly changing industry where trends come and go frequently. I am still working on some of those web design trends including responsive web design, flat design, perfecting the user experience, performance and speed to develop more appealing company website design.
However, what are some new and emerging trends in web design industry in 2016?
Let’s take a look through some of these trends that you must know.
Navigations and Menus: Being a web designer myself, I have noticed that we just can’t get the navigation or the menu of a website down. We keep experimenting with it and doing different and new things to get it to be useful and work well. We strive to understand the best way to display this important piece of content to make it usable regardless of what screen it is being viewed on.
To Scroll or Not to Scroll: We have reached to a point where scrolling increases site’s readership, but we want less scrolling. For 2016, I have anticipated some websites that are going with minimum scrolling, while some are embracing the long scroll.
There are drawbacks and benefits to both. Long scrolling feels natural and it’s easier than clicking. But, it spreads the content and makes it harder to find particular information. While short scrolls gets to the main point, but it may be so quick that it increases the chances of bounce rate.
Designing in Components and Modules Instead of Entire Pages: Web designs are moving towards components and modular designs instead of mocking the entire layouts of a particular page. These components include how the search function will work, the terms of design, how the navigation will be laid out, etc.
We’ve evolved into understanding that we have reused elements on various screens and these elements needs to be designed both so that they can work independently as well as with the rest of the site.
Not only that we are concerned about how the components carry all their individual functionalities, but also the looks of these components in terms of design too. Designing with modules and components permits the same functionalities no matter where it’s being displayed on the site.
Design Continued to Flat Out: As the responsive web design took pretty much over the web, flat design is being continued to be a dormant design aesthetic in 2016. The site which already embraced flat design trend earlier will make things even flatter.
Take Google’s logo for example, the company changed their logo to make it more flat and changed the font too. They found that a cleaner sans-serif font for their logo helped them reduce the size of logo file by half used on sites. They also found that it was easier to read on smaller devices.
This includes updates to logo, images, icons and other elements which didn’t get fully flattened the first time. You can thank the drive to get contents to viewers more effectively.
Material Design Took Off: As many of you might know that Google had released its Material Design Language back in 2014, but the adoption was bit slow. However, designers today have the better understanding of Material Design and I expect they will begin to opt it more in their designs.
Since we have reached peak flat design, designers are opting for the next thing, which Google helps them in the Material Design Language. I am expecting many sites soon to follow this same material design language in 2016.
Conclusion: It’s pretty common in web designers to know how to code the front end (HTML/CSS/JS), therefore designing in the browser makes sense to them. But, as the trend is moving out of Photoshop, Sketch and illustrator and into the browser, I expect many designers will start to work on their HTML and CSS chops.