While rummaging through my feeds and catching up on some reading this morning I stumbled across an article titled “2008 Design Trends” over at the Web Designer Wall. Before getting into this, let me first say that the Web Designer Wall itself has been a beautiful and inspiring site for quite some time and deserves a nod of recognition. Ok that out of the way and moving on. My reason for taking such interest in this post has a lot to do with my recent decision to travel down the path of the freelancer. I have been scouring these lists and galleries over the past week or so looking for inspiration and spotting out the trends that might carry over into my own work. I too have noticed many of the trends that are the focus of this list. Things are getting a bit artsy, we are seeing some grunge, watercolor, sketching, written notes, scripts and the emergence of old world style elements. I like it, I think my design style meshes well here and is perhaps the reason that the transition to my current site design was such and easy one to make. So after looking through the list and spending a considerable amount of time opening up tab after tab of examples, I dove into the comments to see what other people are saying. What I found was both interesting and inspiring.
A lot of the people involved in the discussion pointed out that there was no trend here at all but a variety. That is the beauty of it and shows that we are once again making progress in developing the web. A year ago you might have scoured the various “galleries” to notice an overload of glossy buttons and shiny gradients, the “original web 2.0″. Not to say that there isn’t still a place for this type of design and for some it works very well, but to see that we are branching off into a variety of directions is an idea I welcome with open arms. If you were to browse the local magazine rack only to find that it was filled with hundreds of publications all based off of the same design, would you get excited about it? Variety as they say, is “the spice of life”.
These are my thoughts on the trends, what are yours?
With the emerge of Web 3.0 I think we will run into the simplicity of websites to allow interactivity between clients and viewers. I agree the trend seems to focus on simplicity (water melon colors, substantial copy but not excessive, functional layouts and most important key SEO strategies).
Carmen, I think that you are definitely on the right track with your assumptions on where site design is headed. Aesthetics will always be a factor but I think we are going to see a continued evolution of usability and interactivity. One comment I found very interesting in the original post I mentioned was, “when did WordPress become a trend?” I feel that platforms such as WordPress are focused on and will provide just the type of functionality, simplicity and SEO strategy that you point out, and are shaping the future of the internet. It is nice to see that we are getting back to the original concept of shared information and connectivity, the possibilities have always been open and endless as to where we go next.