17 Top Website Design Trends to Look out for in the year 2016

Web Design is my bread and butter. As much as oxygen is important to you, so is web design to me and I know this is what brings you over to me.

We are all well aware of the fact that web design has a constantly changing face. None of the  trends seem to last, as each season they get replaced with something better.

Web designers are on the quest to find the best strategy that will help them create awesome websites that are simple, beautiful, aesthetic yet professional.

But, be careful, Artificial Intelligences like the Grid make it possible to create professional website designs. Who knows maybe one fine morning we might even hear “The Grid replaces web designers”.

Now don’t fret!!! This is never going to happen.

Creativity is your key my dear designer friend. It will open the door to the bigger world out there.

I will tell you how?

People are always searching for something trendy, unique and new. You just need to fulfill their demands keeping in line with creativity.

Let us talk about the web design trends that you need to implement for the year 2016:

#1. Responsiveness:

It is no longer upto you to decide whether you want to implement responsiveness across your website or not. Things were different until April 21st, 2015 when Google started pulling down websites that are non-responsive.

Though Google repeatedly notified site owners and webmasters about its move to make responsiveness an important strategy, it was not until the day that they found their websites were nowhere over the search engines, that they realized Google was serious about responsiveness.

What does this mean?

If you already have a website that is non-responsive, then this is the first thing you should be doing right now. Make it responsive!!!

No one wants to lose their dear people over the web and this is why people have made mobile their first screen while designing.

Designer’s play:

Since responsiveness is what matters, providing a great User Experience over the mobile phones is the first priority.

A web designing expert will never commit the mistake of hiding desktop functionality for mobile users.

As per the rules of responsiveness, you cannot create a layout that will fit in your artworks and Graphic designs. Stop following the “one format contains all” procedure to design your sites.

Logos, banners or images or whatever visual content you’ve got with you will be taken care of by your responsive design.

There was a time when designers found it difficult to embed any kind of visual content into their responsive designs.  But, you can easily get it done by following the responsive design principles.

I would request you to take a look at how Netflix redesigned their brand.

Let 100% responsiveness be your call for 2016.

#2. Love Hamburgers:

Being a designer never say no to Hamburgers. Ahem!!! I’m talking about Hamburger menus.

Hiding everything under Hamburgers:

It derives its name Hamburger from the concept that it looks like a bun-meat-bun-sandwich or 3 hot dogs held together.

But, the problem is it was not received well by the audience.

Emergence of Mobile responsiveness:

This is what gave birth to Hamburger menus.

When people view things across smaller screens, site navigation gets hidden under a single menu. This remains hidden until the user clicks through.

This helps to save a lot of whitespaces and keeps the users adhered to what they have been searching for.

The concept of hamburger menus is that though it is hidden, out of experience people know that they can get their hands on it whenever they need it.

Also, we will soon witness another trend which is one of the wildest predictions for the year 2016: hamburger menus paves the way for multi-directional scrolling.

Unsure of  the form that this will take, let us keep our fingers crossed for a miracle.

Designmodo has illustrated the need for hamburger menus in websites.

#3. Flat Designs:

Flat Design has grown a lot since it was introduced. It has even become one of the favorites of web designers.

Though, the introduction of material design seems to have posed a threat to its existence but looks like it will stay.

And, will grow all the way to becoming popular over the years to come.

Flat Designs works on the principle that “Less is always more”. And, people always accept less when it comes to visual designs.

One of the added advantages of Flat Designs is the User Experience that it provides. The image files are light-weight and this contributes to reducing the page load time.

Let us work towards improving the user experience.

#4. User and User Experience!

Let us keep all other things to a side. Users and user experience should be your key focus.

Do you think visual appearance actually matters if your site cannot provide an enhanced user experience?

Obviously, not! It never matters if your site is useless.

Your site should be extraordinary if you want to drive an active user engagement. This is the only factor that will help in the success of your online business.

Customer or visitor behavior is the point that Google points to. This means your website needs to load quickly and should not be complex.

While designing sites, especially Ecommerce websites, page load speed should come before creating an enticing appearance for your site. This is the most important aspect of customer conversion.

#5. Infographics:

People love Infographics that weave together beautiful stories through enticing images.

Why Infographics?

Statistics reveal that a cool Infographics gets shared 3 times more than any other kind of visual data.

This is one among the 1000 reasons why people utilize the power of Infographics.

So, now the topic for discussion is not about the popularity of Infographics at generating customer interest, but the kind of Infographics that will create buzz in the year 2016.

Yes, I am talking about blending in Infographics with big data. This is the most anticipated trend that will change the face of Infographics. Here, you can find some tips on creating the right kind of Infographics.

#6. Designs that are colorful:

The world will be more colorful than it was in the year 2015. The boring colors will not do the trick any more.

Let us color it up in deep and bright colors.

#7. Time to bid goodbye to Stock Photos:

Lately, we have realized that Stock Photos are too boring and we need something more interesting. Why don’t we utilize the power of natural photography when we are ourselves born talents?

Though, it was too late before the realization of killing stock photos dawned, better late than never. Looks like 2016 will have Stock Photos totally out of the designer’s bucket of tools.

The problem arouse when a number of online sources came up with the idea to provide people with free images that are of excellent quality, but all the same.

You can customize images, or get a professional do it for you. Even hand-drawn illustrations are highly rated by people.

If not, any of these let us think of something bigger…

#8. Videos:

We just discussed trashing the idea of Stock Photos and thinking about something bigger than that. How about Videos and GIFs?

Already, we can find a number of websites with some sizzling video backgrounds.

The only problem is that these sites take longer to load. This will get solved when people learn to compress the video as mentioned here.

Animated GIFs is again another thing that has already made a huge buzz winning over millions of hearts.

#9. Typography:

This is something that you need to keep an eye out for. If you examine some of the coolest Infographics of the previous year, you’ll find that each of them has appealing fonts. Ernesto Olivares says typography is a language and also specifies its importance in branding.  

Gone are the days of those Arial font types. Typography is the new cool. Thanks to Google’s array of fonts.

Let us keep our fingers crossed for the return of the battalion of these long-forgotten fonts. These bigger fonts will be used in logos and headings.

Looks like the year 2016 is all set to welcome hand-drawn graphics.

#10. Infinite Scrolling:

People prefer Scrolling over clicking.

And, what is the latest trend in scrolling?

It is Modular Scrolling. Modular scrolling is nothing but you can find that all the modules on the website scroll independently of the other.

This trend changed the face of web design in the year 2015 when social media networking biggies such as the Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter started rolling out the infinite scroll mania across their websites.

Scrolling is infact easier than clicking and this is what makes Infinite and Modular Scrolling possible.

As the user scrolls down, the previous content fades away paving way for new content to appear.

#11. Web Designs that are App-Inspired:

Web Designers need to learn something from these apps. People get addicted to apps that provide them with a greater user experience.

The same applies to website designs that provide people with a better browsing experience.

This kind of app-like functionalities that provides null distractions, great speed, and an enhanced user experience should be tailored across website designs.

This idea of exclusiveness needs to be implemented to help users interact and gain access to your content as fast as they could.

All that it talks about is user experience.

The designer’s goal is to embed a great user experience in his designs. With app-inspired designs, the year 2016 will change the level of user experience.

#12. Modular text:

Repeatedly, we’ve been warned not to put longer texts. These appear to be too boring.

Honestly, I would myself never prefer to read longer texts.

By the year 2015, almost everyone started practicing to write shorter paragraphs by breaking longer ones into shorter.

This is when Modular design came into the bigger picture and changed the face of web layout.

A number of big heads have already used Modular design to provide the readers a better experience.

A block grid technique is what Modular text and modules is all about. It might be a complicated structure to anticipate.

But, makes it easier to read. For instance, if you are searching for 10 tips on Email marketing and you want to know what the 7th tip says. You just need to scroll through the grid that contains the 7th tip for more information.

There is no wastage of time or effort here. The Grid is now a bigger picture.

#13. Grids:

As we have already discussed, Grids are a bigger picture. We are now living in an era where web designs will be evolving in a gridular format which is something that fuels a designer’s worst fear.

The Grid Layout will set a SPEC benchmark in the CSS language.

Grids are not the only trendsetters for web designs, but soon we will see varying geometrical shapes and patterns emerging.

If you observe the modern minimalist designs, you will find that these are all derived from Swiss designs. The underlying principle of Swiss Design is that everything will be contained within a Grid System.

Pinterest is already using the Grid System and we can see that there are a lot of others following suit.

Also, we can hope there is something big cooking. Experts predict that there will be free form images emerging apart from the Geometrical shapes and patterns.

#14. Sophisticated Retros:

Sophisticated or modernized retros will soon be emerging as a part of the web and graphic designs. This was once seen rocking the world of logo designs.

Let us keep our fingers crossed for the magic to unveil.

#15. Storytelling:

We have heard a lot about the magic of storytelling. It is infact a great crowd puller. Now, the next question is when it has already created so much of hype what is the new trendsetter?

Visualized Storytelling is all set to conquer the hearts of millions.

It is already being implemented by many. So why not you and me?

Let us utilize the power of visual storytelling for our websites and witness the magic.

#16. Single Page Website Design Trends:

We know that people love scrolling than clicking and this is where Single Page comes into the picture.

It helps to provide a greater User Experience. See what Rebecca Gordon says about scrolling. She says everybody loves to scroll.

With the smaller screen gaining more prominence, single page website designs will rule the world of website design..

#17. Time to bid goodbye to Parallax Scrolling:

We know that Parallax Scrolling has been a trendsetter for quite sometime now. But, let it be not too late before you actually realize you have been doing it the wrong way all these times.

Under this technique, the content in the foreground and background scrolls at different speeds. It rather creates an illusion.

This illusion might have a visual effect but it has some problems too such as not good from the SEO perspective, poor performance and more…

These are some of the trends I believe would change the face of website design in the year 2016.

Do you think there are more that can bring about efficiency in creating website designs that are attractive? Then, let us know. Share your thoughts, comments and feedback with us…

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