Thunderbolt Digital are a local digital agency and web design Surrey-based company that offers a range of professional services all the way from web design and development to social media management. As a digital agency with a highly skilled team of web designers and developers, we like to keep up with current trends in web design so that we can continue to create fantastic looking websites for our current and upcoming clients. With the rolling in of the new year, we thought we’d take an educated guess as to which web design elements will be on trend for 2016, and which will fall from favour.
Depth vs Flat Design
The use of shadow has been seen as something of a no-no for the past few years (especially where text is concerned) and there’s been a rise in flat designs due to their simplistic and clean feel. However, Google’s reveal of their material design is paving the way for designs that don’t quite so, well, flat. Use of shadows and limited movement gives an illusion of depth whilst still remaining clear and clean-looking. We see a lot of people adopting a look like this in the upcoming year in an effort to be more appealing and engaging to the user than simple flat designs.
Simple Typography
Emphasis has been placed upon simple typography for the past few years, and this is something that we think is set to continue. Attempting to create cohesion between more elaborate fonts can prove difficult in web design, and is something best left to single images rather than whole web pages. Fancy fonts do look nice, but most users prefer to be able to easily read and navigate sites rather than be confronted with beautiful but illegible typography.
Responsive Design
Google’s ‘mobilegeddon’ and the sheer high number of users who browse the internet on mobile devices means that responsive design won’t be going anywhere anytime soon, as well as any commonly associated features, such as minimalism of ‘tile’ formats. Though mobile responsiveness is less of a trend and something more of a necessity these days, we hope to see some innovation from web designers surrounding it in order to find new and interesting ways to keep things uncluttered but still with good UX (user experience).