We are one of the strong believers that the year 2012 will bring new trends in the web designing. In fact, in this highly competitive Industry, every web designer must welcome new trends in order to provide the best quality services to their clients. A professional web designer always looks for innovative ideas, new tools and new trends for giving an edge to his creativity skills. There is a saying – New trends come and go, but only few will leave their mark. It’s really amazing to watch the quick transformation of web designing trends each year.
Last year we did a pretty good summary, and hit the mark in quite a few places. Here, we are making another attempt to predict the new trends that may go and hit the year 2012.
Navigation
We have talked before about the importance of search-ability of website content, but this is only half of the equation. The second we can term “find-ability”. Employing intuitive navigation techniques will significantly increase the usability of the site, and for that reason user satisfaction & return rates. Fixed-Position Navigation yields more results when compared to slideshow content, especially for mobile browsers fixed navigation is more suitable since it removes the worries of screen resolution and other issues. Find your content easily and the user hangs around.
Typography
Web designers will give lot of importance to the header of any website, but its not always about the logo. Selecting the right font, shading, weight, color and white space is a big (and important) task. Thus, Typography has become a part of the web design process. The year 2011 has seen the growth of Typekit font. Most of the WordPress designers preferred this font database (at a cost). During trail period, it offers free font library. Now, the scenario has changed, the new craze is Google Web Fonts. By using this Google tool, now the designers can easily use the typography of their choice. So we feel Google Web Fonts usage will grow in popularity as they are now supporting a whopping 422 font families.
HTML5 and CSS3
We use animations for capturing the attention of our website audience. All though this years flash animations dominated the animation scene. For the year 2012, a lot of people are expecting the domination of HTML5 and CSS3 over Flash, since HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery facilitated the usage of less coding lines as well as ease of use. Now, most of the web designers consider HTML5 and CSS3 are replacement to Flash. But Flash has got its own importance. We believe that Flash will continue to enjoy its popularity, especially among entertainment site designers and it is going to remain a favourite choice – for now.
Infographics
2012 is going to see more and more Infographics on their websites especially in content and data heavy industries. This trend is going to increase in popularity pretty quickly this year. People prefer Infographics instead of plain text since it facilitates the presentation of data along with images, charts, and supporting imagery so that the web users find it very easy to understand what we want to say. An Infographic is like a link between the content and user interactivity, so maybe we will start to see more interactive infographics… now that would be cool
What do you think is coming up this year? what is going to be hot on your next website?
Hopefully some quirky sites and not this dry UX boring nonsense. UX is important but its like edible food , there is so much more to design. UX should be built upon.