2014: 5 Trends in Web Development
Guest Author: Bret Kerr, Web Designer
New Horizons Northeast
As the use of smartphones and tablets has continued to boom, web design trends for 2014 center around functional, clean design that enhance the user experience and facilitate seamless e-commerce transactions.
Below are five trends I am noticing in front-end web development:
1. Responsive Design
Using a combination of HTML5, CSS3 and media queries, savvy web designers are able to create designs that look good on a variety of screen sizes. Responsive designs are based on grids to work effectively. With carefully crafted code, a four column layout can change to a two column layout on a tablet and a one column layout on a phone. Banner images and text can also swap out depending on the screen size.
Online retailers are leveraging responsive design to engage customers on whatever screen they happen to be using. Adobe’s has added additional support for responsive design, such as multiple device previews and an interactive CSS designer, to Dreamweaver CC. Captivating responsive designs also lead to pages that stack more content vertically such as Nike.com.
New Horizons Northeast’s new website is designed using a responsive framework. If you resize your browser you will see how the content changes.
2. Strong Typography
With the rising number of fonts specially designed for web use, designers are utilizing strong typography in lieu of stock art or tired Photoshop effects to make a first impression above the fold.
Web fonts are hosted on vendor sites and code in the design makes the fonts available to anybody in the world. Google offers a free collection via their fonts api and Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription suite also offers hundreds of fonts as part of the monthly subscription plan.
High-end type foundries, such as Hoefler and Company, who produced the ubiquitous Gotham font, have also provided a web font subscription offering.
3. Flat Design
For the past several years, user interface has been moving away from the skeumorphic look that Apple popularized. Skeumorphic describes when an UI is made to look photo realistic to simulate a real world object. This was used in the first generation Mac operating system so that novice computer users would understand what the icons meant. With the global ubiquity of smartphones, the approach is no longer needed to facilitate a good user experience.
Microsoft pushed flat design into the mainstream with its use of flat, pared down icons and simple background colors within Windows 8. With the release of ios7, Apple design evangelist Jonathan Ivy has joined the trend of flat design, with a few more subtle flourishes thrown in. Flat design works well with responsive frameworks and the pared down iconography lets the strong typography take shine.
4. Video
As quality video has become cheaper to produce in-house, more companies are embedding different types of marketing videos to demonstrate their products and tell their story succinctly. HTML5 has a specifically designed element that enables web pages to play videos without plug-ins.
The iPads non-support of Flash has become less of an issue over the past couple of years as more and more sites stream their videos using HTML5. And many sites will also embed YouTube videos to leverage their built in metrics, shareability and potential to monetize content.
5. HTML5 and CSS3 for Animation
In addition to advanced video support, combinations of HTML5 and CSS3 have a myriad number of advanced animation abilities that designers are using to produce everything from interactive resumes to high-end parallax scrolling designs for major clients.
See how many of these trends you can spot on UK digital marketing firm Alchemy Digital’s site.
I hope this article can shed light onto a handful of design trends we’ll prominently notice in future projects. Also, if you have ideas for 2014 design trends I may have forgotten, please share with us in the comments area below. Our readers would love to hear from you.
At New Horizons, we’re talking about web design and web development everyday—and not just with a variety of clients, but with leading vendors—about industry trends and real-life challenges.
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