With the continuing growth of mobile technologies, mobile web design trends are also evolving. Smart phone market saturation is already shaping the year 2014 into a year when businesses will start to move furniture with the personalization of their content. Below are web design trends that just might dominate mobile web design next year.
- Mobile-first design. Begin designing on the small screen, and widen it out to tablets and desktops.
- Responsive. Use an adaptive or responsive design so your website will work well whatever the screen size is.
- Simplicity. Many web designs are now going for a minimalistic look. The design should not get in the way of content.
- White space. This goes along with simplicity and should help emphasize the content.
- No flash. Websites are now doing away from Flash to more modern design languages like CSS3 and HTML5.
- Parallax. This is a design that gives design depth and an almost 3D look to a website. This is like the layers in Photoshop, only that it is done on websites.
- Flat design. This design focuses on a clean look with good use of whitespace and color. Think of the new iOS design and you should get the idea.
- Blocking. It features blocks of content, similar to Pinterest. This works great on websites where there is a ton of content and they are all on equal footing.
- Large images. Using big images on websites is a big trend, sometimes with a large image in the background of a website.
- Colors. Web design is colorful these days, from retro colors to calm and subtle colors to even retro colors.
- Web fonts. We are no longer limited to a few web-safe fonts. Web designers can now use new web fonts like Typekit or Google Fonts.
- Video. Video remains to grow in importance. In fact, a report says that 78% of online adults now download or watch video content. This is a great way to provide viewable content to your site.
- Social media. Integrating social media is important for all kinds of organizations and websites. It is a great way to share content to customers.
- Large buttons. Websites are now starting to use big and easily seen buttons. Make them bold and big.
- Vertical scrolling. Use sticky navigation that is glued to the top of the page, or social media sharing plugins at the side of the page.
And these are 15 of the predicted web design trends for 2014. Know that mobile is just getting started, and it is indeed exciting. From here on, it will affect that designers will designs website and how marketers market their brand, so it is important to keep posted.