7 Web Design Trends To Look Out For In 2015

With a new year, comes new ideas and trends. 2015 will be no different. It’s not expected that anything extreme or revolutionary will happen in web design trends this new year. Expect to see changes and improvements to last years trends, a stronger need to move forward with some and the desire to move away from more distracting and time consuming methods.

Flat Design

Influenced by Swiss design, flat design is a minimalistic design approach that emphasis on responsive design and gives a less distinctive view making room for greater UI. Flat design has already been adopted by larger companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Google. We’ll see a lot of existing sites redesigned using flat design styles this year.

Responsive Design

Mobile device and tablet users continues to rise. 2015 will see an even greater increase of mobile and tablet use over previous years. These devices can no longer be ignored. Responsive Design is a relatively new way of developing a single website that transforms and reshapes itself to fit on all device sizes while maintaining its visual appearance and readability. The majority of sites developed in 2015 will be responsive and many non-responsive sites will be modified to be made responsive.

Large Photos / Videos

Large photos with minimal text will become the centerpiece of of many web sites in 2015. Videos will also begin to dominate websites. Today’s website visitors are busy and lazy. Videos will replace lengthy text as the majority of website visitors would rather sit back and watch someone describe a product or feature rather than read a few paragraphs of text. Lengthy text will mainly benefit search engines and will not be read by the average visitor.

Larger Fonts

Gone are the days of small fonts. Small fonts were used in the past in an attempt to ensure that the majority of content stays above the fold. The fear was that website visitors were not savvy enough to always recognize that more content could be viewed by scrolling downwards. With adults spending an average of 23 hours per week on the internet, they’re sure to have the scrolling thing figured out. Larger text is extremely important for our seniors as 70% of all seniors are browsing the web.

Decline of the One Page Parallax

In 2014 we saw a huge increase of one page website with fancy image effects known as Parallax. Developers followed this awkward trend where the contents of a multi-page website were crammed onto a single page. The content grew too long and the use of imagery decreased page load time. Search engines do not rank these single page site very well due to the excessive amounts of content, lack of separate pages and the amount of time it takes for the page to load. The use of simple parallax effects will continue to grow in 2015 but we’ll see a big decline in one page parallax sites and lengthy pages.

Subtle Effects

Web developers will find that 2015 gives great opportunities with the decline of old web browser versions and the use of modern browsers that upgrade automatically. This gives developers the ability to use cutting edge technology including CSS3 effects and HTML5 without worrying about what they’ll look like on Internet Explorer 8 (or older, ick!). This means we’ll see more subtle effects such as fading roll-overs, rounded corners, and objects that grow, shrink, or slide and hover.

Video Backgrounds and Banners

With increase of HTML5 adoption in modern browsers, we’ll see more use of videos as backgrounds to pages and banners. Muted and slow moving videos will begin to replace background images giving life to the page without providing too much distraction.