2016: How Should Your Website Look Then?
Yes, we know: 2016 is not here yet; but we also know that good businessmen plan ahead, so we thought you might want to know what we expect next year’s web design trends to be. First of all, you should understand that you are in no real danger of having to change your website completely. If you want to incorporate these trends (even though, if your designer is worth his name, you already have), we are only talking about small adjustments.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at them:
Another take on originality
With mobile responsiveness becoming the norm, more and more websites start to look too much alike and, of course, this can’t be good for business. I’m sure you already know what we mean: a few blocks with text, contrasting colors and that’s it. Since we can’t afford to give up mobile responsiveness, we will really have to get creative: personalized illustrations (preferably hand-made) will probably become the norm.
Flat design will continue to evolve
It hasn’t been that long since the world switched to flat design (thanks for finally getting on board, Apple!), but we still can’t say it got the attention it needed until the introduction of Android 5.0 and iOS 7/8. Of course, everything was swell on mobile, but on desktop…not so much. Android contributed a lot to implementing a better way to deal with flat design; we all remember the “card” concept. Still, we expect 2016 to be the year in which white space will play an important role in design and parallax will be scaled down in favor of clean backgrounds.
Typography focus
Thanks to Google Fonts, developers are no longer restricted to using only Arial or, God forbid, Comic Sans and Times New Roman. With a whole new world of opportunities open to them, developers can now pay more attention to the fonts they use and the way the fonts integrate with the rest of the website.
The “hamburger” menu is here to stay
Some people criticized it and claimed that it made navigation much harder. But designers stood by it, most likely because they loved how de-cluttered the website looked without the bulky top-menus and, thanks to this, the hamburger menu is now easily recognizable by users all over the world. With navigation ease no longer threatened by it, we see no reason for the hamburger menu to take a step back and leave the stage open to the same menu style it replaced.
Long scroll will also remain dominant
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Much like the hamburger menu, long scroll was also criticized for not being user-friendly. People said that it is annoying to have to scroll for miles until you find what you are interested in. While that may be true, it is no less true that people have grown accustomed to this from their increasing mobile usage, so it has become the norm. You no longer need to place everything important at the top of the page; your visitors know they need to scroll down and they seem to enjoy it. Plus, with Millennia-dedicated websites, like mic.com using this feature even for switching to new articles we don’t see it buried too soon.
Which of these trends are already implemented on your website?
