We explored the latest trends and techniques in web design and listed the most interesting ones. There are some web design trends that are coming from the previous year, but will probably be adopted on a larger scale in 2015. Here are the best of them:
1. Material design
Google is setting a new design trend by introducing its material design into the latest version of Android, web applications and Chrome OS. Material design comprises specific components, patterns, style, interaction design across different types of devices. It reproduces real tactile materials like paper and ink, using animation and lightning.
With material design you can achieve beautiful layouts, transitions, scrolling effects and awesome interaction designs. User’s action provides meaning, transforming the whole design. Here are some nice examples of material design elements.
Google even launched Polymer library, to help designers and developers easily create material design components, applications for desktop or mobile, etc.
2. Responsive design, again
There is no doubt that responsive web design is a must these days. Why? Because more and more users are accessing websites using their mobile devices, and your design should look nice on all of them. Recent statistics show that in 2014 mobile Internet usage increased by 67%. Thus, 28.5% of users were accessing the web using their smartphones and 6.8% using their tablets. This means that mobile devices account for 35.3% of Internet usage. In 2015, “mobile first” design will be for sure an important factor to consider.
3. SVG, a step forward
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is probably the best format for responsive web design. It fits ideally flat and material design and it could become the default image format in the future. The advantage of SVG is that it’s a vector format and it’s keeping its sharpness after scaling. Also, you can manipulate it with CSS or JavaScript and create awesome animations.
SVG allows web designers to think less about different screen resolutions and focus solely on their design.
4. Style guides
Style guide is an efficient way to consolidate and standardize your markup and CSS, and document the visual components of your website (header, colors, forms, typography, etc.). It’s a comprehensive guide/repository of design and code that can be used as a reference for the whole team (project manager, developers, designers, etc.).
Style guides have a lot of benefits: you standardize your CSS and can build new components/pages faster, you keep your design consistent, you have an efficient communication on the project, you’re documenting your work.
Here is a complete guide on how to create and manage your style guides.
5. Scrolling for everyone
As the mobile Internet usage emerges, long scrolling pages will be more present. It will probably be completed with interactions, effects and animation to provide a great UX and turn the content into an interactive story.
Studies show that most of the users (from 91% to 100%) will scroll down the page and reach the bottom. Moreover, many users will scroll down even before the page loads completely and over 80% of the views are occurring just above the fold (at approximately 550px). Here is a nice research about scroll behavior of users across the web.
6. Interaction design
A unique web design is a design that provides meaning and emotion. These can be achieved via interactions, which can be defined as feedback mechanisms providing a great UX. The interactions that are created by designers can separate awesome experiences from poor ones.
Have a look at this interesting interaction design examples by Chris Wright – an interaction designer from Sydney, Australia.
7. Custom typography
Web typography is not only the use of fonts on your website. It’s the art of creating and manipulating the typefaces and whitespace as a mean of communication and readability. As Oliver Reichenstein said “Web design is 95% typography”. Beside existing components and resources like Google fonts, Ghost buttons, lettering, big headlines, icon fonts, text animation, etc. we will probably notice a mix of new vs. old techniques that will offer users and designers more flexibility.
You can find everything you should know about practical typography in this ebook or browse some examples of websites with good typography, listed by Awwwards.
8. Wearables, get ready for them
The revolution of iPhone 6 and Apple Watch will for sure change the way we design. As we previously investigated this topic, we can assume that the quick adoption of wearable devices will accelerate this process. Web designers will have to move their focus from traditional design for web pages to more flexible design for mobile apps and wearables. We’ll keep an eye on those smartwatches!
9. Performance
Site speed is a ranking factor in Google search algorithm. Google encourages web masters to make their web pages load fast on all devices. While this is not mainly a front-end trend, there are lots of optimizations that can be done in CSS and JavaScript to achieve a better performance.
Google is the pioneer in this area. You can investigate your website’s load time online or inspect lots of parameters in Google Chrome console (timeline, rendering, audits, etc.).
10. Decline of Adobe and frameworks
This is what you’ll not see in 2015. Web designers will still opt for Photoshop to create their works and be a part of its huge community. The Adobe’s releases, presence and authority will keep professionals under its influence. As of popular frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation, we’ll not notice a considerable decline. We could expect some custom tools and small frameworks for specific cases.
Conclusion
2015 will be another year full of excitement and new trends in web design industry. We’re doing our best to implement the latest web design techniques and to offer professional products. We’ve done a lot in this direction and more implementations are yet to come: TeslaThemes site redesign, new WordPress theme based on material design, internal style guides, page speed optimizations and much more.
Keep an eye on the latest web design trends; leave a comment if you have more trends to share!
Jerome van Rasmus
19 Jan 2015From your last 5 released WP Themes, which ones are covering these 10 issues? Nice article though
tesla
19 Jan 2015Good question. Our latest themes are covering most of these trends, except #8, but we’ll be following the evolution of wearables.
Murinyo
19 Jan 2015Great article, but I thing the WebGL is missing here. In my opinion, in this year will be popular 3D layout using javascript graphics library, that will open new web experiences.
Todd
21 Jan 2015Think more respectively, Responsive Design is maturing to finally take Flexbox seriously, even though its been around in some form or another for the last 4+ years, when adopted it really does blow away most cases of regular floats and percentages. Also the adoption of calc() commands, and finally more moves away from IE8.
Also, the slow rise of Shadow DOM/Web Components on its early trek toward implementations. A kind of appeasement to the old XHTML days meets HTML+JS Custom objects.
Thirdly, I think perhaps (perhaps too soon) a push to put WordPress into the Microsoft Front Page category of CMS’s, if made public enough and better supported things like Ghost, Jekyll/OctoPress, etc would fill in that blogger nitch better, probably not this year though of course.
Jack
10 Feb 2015Responsive website development task is one of the most challenging task for all the developers,but yes in 2015 it will be little easy because there are many advanced tools are available that makes the website more creative and user-friendly. Custom typography is the attractive feature of responsive website development.
forbiddeen
11 Feb 2015Great job, i can share in my site? do a portugueses version?
tesla
12 Feb 2015Hi, sure you can, don’t forget to include a link to the original version.
sam
16 Feb 2015I think SVG is going to be huge this year, Parallax scrolling as well. These all are recent trends in web designing, here you gave a basic and useful information of top trends which will be really useful to designers. Thanks for the great article!
Linda
4 Mar 2015Great article, and your themes are good as well. 🙂
govtvyanichka
5 Mar 2015You mentioned good websites for an inspiration, but I would like to add one more… It is the crowdsourcing platform where you can get not only inspiration but perfect support help and a lot of ideas for your logo. https://www.designcontest.com/logo-design/
Robin
11 Mar 2015I totally agree with you. Responsiveness is something that can’t be dead until we have Smartphone users on earth. I also liked your point about “Wearables”. It’s a big fact that people are becoming more and more aware day by day and their tendency of using technology is also increasing. In this situation it’s really important to get our self ready for such high tech gadgets. Thanks for all the tips!
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Sunday Skaer
11 Jun 2015Great Job !! Thanks for updating the users with new trends of 2015, it will help me a lot while making new websites. I learn lots of ideas from here. Really nice blog.
Jane Fox
25 Jun 2015That’s an interesting study about scrolling. I wouldn’t have thought it was such a big deal. I like the idea of a web design creating a story out of content through scrolling. It looks like the web is becoming more and more personal and even enjoyable, which I think is a good thing. I’m excited to see how these trends continue to develop.
graphitech
7 Nov 2015It is absolutely true with the case of the wearable gadgets. These are going to bring in a drastic change in the way websites are designed. Obviously every business needs its website to be built and developed using the latest trends of the market. All the points which are mentioned here are worth to remember and keep in mind while developing websites for any client.
Oliver Felton
5 Jan 2016The most interesting thing about this article is that, it covers all the important and traditional ways of website designing but it also offers so many other new things and concepts about website designing which should try everyone for make their website visually better.
Surely this article will be helpful to the many website designers, especially to me!!!
zoya
18 Feb 2016Great artical!!!
Website Design company in Minneapolis MN
3 May 2016Good post
Ashika
20 Jun 2017Nice post
lucymanie
27 Jun 2018Really great blog. Thanks for sharing this blog. I hope the gadgets here will help me to design my website.