Top 20 Web Design & Development Trends This Year – Part 2

Top 20 Web Design & Development Trends This Year – Part 2

11. Storytelling and personality

Bluegg studio manager Rob Mills reckons 2013 has seen a “further step in the direction of storytelling and personality on the web, achieved through a greater focus on content and an increase in the use of illustration”. He says content strategy has always been important, but we’ve nonetheless of late seen a renewed focus on content. “Agencies and individuals have therefore been having to work better with clients on content-creation and management, which can only be a positive thing for user experiences.”

12. Making a profit

We’re used to seeing venture capitalists fling money at half-baked ideas, and major players open bulging wallets to pay absurd money for existing services (witness Facebook’s $1billion purchase of Instagram). Developer, speaker and writer Rachel Andrew hopes the rest of this year year will see this change. “From a business perspective, I’m hoping 2013 will see more celebration of profitable businesses," she says, "rather than glorifying successful funding rounds.”

13. Tablet thinking goes beyond the iPad

Publication designer Roger Black says publishers have continued to "push out native iOS apps” as they realised “the iPad is not the magic pony they’d been looking for”. Android and Microsoft tablet sales, combined with apps not being linkable outside of each platform, will result in more “impressive, hand-built responsive HTML apps that play everywhere”. However, Black adds iOS wrappers for responsive publication templates will “allow publishers to have their app and eat it too, enabling developers to stick to new OS revisions and publishers to stick to content.” Mobile platform strategist Peter-Paul Koch also thinks we should watch out for Tizen: “It’s an HTML5-based mobile OS created by Samsung and Intel, and initial devices are expected in Q2 2013. If Samsung pushes Tizen devices, you’ll know it’s going to be a big deal.” On Firefox OS, Koch is less optimistic: “It will fail, because they can’t produce cheap enough phones that compete with cheap Androids and run a decent browser.”

 

14. The app backlash

Apps remain big business, but some publishers continue to edge to HTML5. Redweb head of innovation David Burton reckons a larger backlash is brewing: “The gold rush is over, and there’s unrest in that apps aren’t all they promised to be. We now live in a just-in-time culture, where Google can answer anything at the drop of a hat, and we no longer need to know the answers. The app model works the old way. Do we need apps for every brand we interact with? Will we even have iPhones in five years’ time? Who knows? But one thing is certain – the internet will remain, and the clever money is on making web apps that work across all platforms, present and future.”

15. A mobile design explosion

Designer/developer Dan Eden says that with “more companies focusing web efforts on mobile,” designers feel the pressure to brush up on the subject, to the point that, “designing for desktop is considered legacy support”. Rowley agrees projects have increasingly “focused on mobile-first regarding design, form, usability and functionality”, and Chris Lake, Econsultancy director of product development, explained this has had an impact on interaction, with web designers exploring natural user interface design (fingers, not cursors) and utilising gestures.

16. Experimental and iterative design

Product designer Faruk Ateş says so far we've seen “a rise of new approaches to design and development”. Rem units, CSS grids support, pre-processors, and a better, wider understanding of RWD will “lead to more people exploring different ways to get the job done, and result in more experimental approaches than we’ve seen so far in real-world situations”. A big shift, reckons Burton, will be more live iteration: “We’re increasingly comfortable using products that aren’t finished. It’s become acceptable to launch a work-in-progress, which is faster to market and simpler to build – and then improve it, add features, and keep people’s attention. It’s a model that works well, especially during recession. As we head into 2013, this beta model of releasing and publicly tweaking could become increasingly prevalent.“

17. Better page layout

Recent years have seen a lot of focus on technology, but many designers see a swing towards design in 2013. Eden is looking forward to typography improvements and was “incredibly excited to hear about Monotype’s acquisition of Typecast and Typekit’s ongoing negotiations with Linotype”. Meyer points at CSS “finally getting strong layout mechanisms it’s lacked since its inception”, through the likes of Flexible Box Layout and Grid Layout. And Lake reckons there’ll be a trend towards ‘nano design’: “The detail matters, and can be the difference between a good experience and a great experience.” Garrett adds we’ll also see a “trend towards not looking CMS-like”, through clients demanding a site run a specific CMS but that it not look like other sites using the system.

18. Scalable web design

According to Nick Pettit, teaching team lead at Treehouse, scalable web design will be big later this year: “SWD is a methodology for designing websites capable of being displayed on screens with both low and high pixel densities. Like RWD, it’s a collection of ideas, techniques, and web standards.” The SWD approach ditches rasters for vectors, utilising SVGs “capable of scaling in size without a loss in detail or sharpness”, and Pettit reckons it was only IE’s lack of SVG support holding designers back; now SWD and SVG are viable.

19. Behaviour-driven discoverability

With so much information now being produced, digital technology strategist James Gardner says this current year has seen a trend towards dealing with discoverability: “Current solutions are clunky and inaccurate, and rely on plenty of input from the user. New solutions will be behaviour-driven and built on more sensitive algorithms working with diverse data sets, such as location and social.” This, he believes, will take the onus off of search and be more proactive in providing related information: “I see this as a race between established companies – Google and Facebook – and startups who focus on niche discovery.”

20. Rise of the hybrid designer

Budd thinks the switch to RWD has brought more collaboration in agency teams: “We’ve seen fewer designs being thrown over the fence to developers, and a rise in cross-functional pairing.” But Mist believes we’ll in reality see more hybrid designers emerge: “Take a brief that requires a responsive design. Give it to a designer who knows how to code and then to one who doesn’t. You’ll get a more effective, fluently designed site from the former. Throw in frameworks, new standards, and massive improvements in capabilities for designing in-browser and the latter will fall further behind. Those who already code have an astonishing playground to create with. Those who don’t need to learn – fast.”

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