Top 20 Web Design & Development Trends This Year – Part 1

Top 20 Web Design & Development Trends This Year – Part 1

Check out these web design and development trends you should be mindful of over the rest of the year.

It was suggested that 2012 would be a year of ongoing economic hardship and attempted internet censorship, and web design and development would also be turbulent. Such predictions proved accurate, with the web industry battling censorship, native apps, and fragmented, rapidly evolving technology. 2013 hasn't been any quieter. Industry figures predict a year of design shifts, evolving device usage, and web consumption adjustments, all of which will impact on designers and developers. All these things and more are explored in these 20 must-know web design and development trends for 2013…

 

1. Baked-in responsive web design

RWD took hold in 2012, but Flash games developer Iain Lobb reckons it’ll go mainstream in 2013. “If you’re designing a website and not thinking about the user experience on mobile and tablets, you’re going to disappoint a lot of users,” he warns. Designer Tom Muller thinks big brands getting on board will lead to agencies “increasingly using responsive design as a major selling point, persuading clients to future-proof digital marketing communications”. When doing so, Clearleft founder Andy Budd believes we’ll see an end to retrofitting RWD into existing products: “Instead, RWD will be a key element for a company’s mobile strategy, baked in from the start.” Because of this, Budd predicts standalone mobile-optimised sites and native apps will go into decline: “This will reduce the number of mobile apps that are website clones, and force companies to design unique mobile experiences targeted towards specific customers and behaviours.”

2. Multi-device design

Designer Laura Kalbag says 2013 has seen “the abandoning of device-specific web design”. She explains that as more devices arrive with varied viewports, “pixel precision and Apple-specific breakpoints will die out, the idea of control will be relinquished, and web design will be more about system design than static mockups”. Developer Remy Sharp agrees: “It’s sunk in that we need to test on mobile, but with IE arriving on Xbox, Jason Grigsby’s TV browsers talk, and Anna Debenham’s excellent state of games browsers, it broadens our deployment targets even further and challenges designers and developers to work in ever more diverse landscapes.” As consultant and author Eric Meyer says, it’s “not just desktop vs mobile any more”, but “desktop and mobile and couch and TV and more”.

3. Flash shifts again

“Last year, I said Flash was here to stay, especially for creating rich, immersive online content in the entertainment sector,” admits Muller, “but the unstoppable rise of tablets and the uptake of standards means Flash is being pushed to the side in favour of fast(er) loading HTML-only sites that deliver future-proof yet equally rich experiences.” However, Lobb notes Flash isn’t quite done: “It still has strongholds: specialist video players, banner-ads, Facebook modules, and games. In web games, some predict HTML5 will take over, but on the desktop I see little evidence for that. Until Internet Explorer adds WebGL support, Flash will remain the go-to technology for web 3D.”

4. Leaner, performance-focused websites

During 2012, the average site size crept over a megabyte, which designer/developer Mat Marquis describes as “pretty gross”, but he reckons there’s a trend towards “leaner, faster, more efficient websites” – and hopes it sticks. He adds: “Loosing a gigantic website onto the web isn’t much different from building a site that requires browser ‘X’: it’s putting the onus on users, for our own sakes.” It’s a sentiment that chimes with many. Chris Mills of Opera/W3C thinks 2013 has seen “more responsible usage of libraries”; he reckons “people will become sensitive to this as they work on more projects that require good support for TV and mobile”. Designer and writer Stephanie Rieger reckons that although people now know “web design isn’t print,” they’ve “forgotten it’s actually software, and performance is therefore a critical UX factor”.

5. Device and design resource-pooling

We’re familiar with people pooling code, but 2013 has seen sharing widen. Instead of studios each maintaining dozens of devices for testing, we’ve seen community device labs. Open source developers often spend so much time working on the technical side of things that the visual side can end up being neglected. But this past year has seen great work from the W3C’s Responsive Images Community Group, which now has a well-designed home on the web that strengthens its image as well as its mission. Code is often open, but not design. Sites like RICG show this doesn’t have to be

6. Modular design

More people are taking advantage of design process building blocks. Through RWD, grid-based, modular GUI design is now stronger than ever. Mo Morgan, head of technology at Kitcatt Nohr Digitas, notes that “Amazon Web Services and others prove infrastructure and platforms can be commoditised”, and “the plethora of available frameworks show it’s no longer necessary for developers to keep reinventing the wheel”. Such building blocks remove pain and expense, he explains, “allowing the masses to make things that would have previously been too arduous or expensive”. Designer/developer Paul Mist says such changes “speed up workflows, so we can spend more time making the web beautiful”, but Morgan worries there’s a possibility 2013 will see people “lose touch with core technologies that underpin all of these things, to the point where if the commoditised offering can’t meet a specific requirement, it effectively can’t be done”.

7. Standards involvement

More developers are taking an active role in the web standards process. Today, you see ‘developer preference' cited in a mailing list thread, but rarely do full-time web developers chime in with opinions. There’s a disconnect, and that impacts both groups negatively – standards bodies get blamed for standardising features developers dislike or don’t understand intuitively, and developers get blamed for ignoring features or using them incorrectly.

8. Industry education

2012 was a good year for web education, and this trend has continued: Sharp stated “I’m talking about educating kids, the ‘yoof’ of today.” He admits the government may not be pushing as hard as the industry would like, but says organisations are filling the gap: “Efforts like Code Club are starting to really land, and I’m seeing an increase in events aimed at teens and youngsters, in web programming and hacking.”

9. New tools for web design and management

With the explosion in RWD, developer Sally Jenkinson believes 2013 is the the year processes and tools evolve. “We’ve seen a move towards designing in the browser, but vendors like Adobe aiming to introduce offerings such as Edge Reflow will impact on existing wireframe and design methodologies.” She thinks lines between mockups and prototypes will blur, and static representations will no longer “accurately reflect the variety of permutations in terms of device renderings”. Redweb head of development Wayne Rowley adds that improved mobile tools are also likely: “CMS vendors are already seeing the need to provide mobile support when creating and managing content, and the next step is to optimise CMS software interfaces, empowering content editors with true flexibility and location-independent content management capabilities”. Adobe’s new Edge suite shifts web design tools from their print-oriented predecessors

10. More video

Internet speeds, including for mobile devices, are rising. People with subscriptions to Adobe Creative Suite have suddenly found themselves with extra ‘free’ software, and are playing around with video packages and experimenting with After Effects. Some video trends will perhaps be less welcome, but we’ll see ongoing heavy use of the DSLR look – narrow depth of field and shake – and slow motion, because more cameras are incorporating that.

 

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