Web Design 2k16: A Recap, forecast… and a cat

Last year, web designers fell in love with minimalism. Ghosted buttons, big hero images and single page designs were just a few trends that occupied our designs. I suppose you could say that for web designers, 2015 was a year of less is more.

But what are we doing now?

Web designers are taking those things we loved in 2015 and building on it. We’re adding more to the less.

That big hero image we loved so much? We’re making it a video gif.

Those beautifully simple line work icons? We’re animating them.

Oh and, that headline… we’re pulling out a set of Japanese brush pens and we’re lettering it by hand.

Designers will put a bigger focus on function this year. We’ll spend more time and energy on the user’s experience filling out the form than we did in the past. We’ll start making those forms full screen and succinct for the sake of our users.

We’ll put more emphasis on social integration. Bedazzling our pages with social commenting features and share buttons, lots of share buttons.

Responsive design has gone the way of the cat video… it’s not going anywhere. Mobile-only users are increasing by the minutes.

It won’t all come easy though, we’re going to continue to struggle with where the menu should go. Is traditional better, or would we rather gorge on a hamburger?

And we’ll argue about whether people scroll or not. Those who accept the truth will design pages that seem to scroll forever. And those who won’t accept the truth are wrong.