7 Web Design Trends of 2016

Every year many new design trends appear on the horizon. Trends in web design, like any fashion trends, come and go. Sometimes trends are dictated by necessity, but others s are mostly industry shifts.

The new year has begun, overflowed with new techniques and trends, but the overriding theme is likely to be a continuation of things we have started to see at the end of 2015.

To say the truth, we shouldn’t expect drastic changes in 2016. We’ll see some current trends growing bigger, some of them slowly fading away and some smaller movements taking a part in the web design industry competition.

So let`s look at the most distinguished and the most followed trends of 2016…

Vertical Patterns and Scrolling

A bigger leaning toward mobile — with some thinking mobile traffic could equal desktop traffic this year — means more sites are being designed with vertical user flows.

Smaller screens lead users to scroll more and designers to create user interfaces that are much more vertical in nature.

Sketch App for UI Design

Sketch is quickly replacing Photoshop for all UI design tasks ranging from low-fidelity wireframes to high-fidelity mockups & icon design.

Sketch App is a Mac-only application made specifically for web and mobile designers. It offers a smoother work environment to craft vector elements for any interface, yet it also retains many features you’d expect from Photoshop like text effects and layer styles.

If Sketch continues to provide the best UI design experience then it’ll surely continue growing well into 2016 and beyond.

Card Layouts

Website card layouts were first popularized by Pinterest a few years back and have since become a trend for content-heavy webpages. Free plugins like jQuery Masonry can be used to mimic this layout style with animated cards for various heights & widths.

A card layout is best used on pages with lots of data that should be scannable. The landing page for Google Now uses a card layout to advertise optional cards for the Google Now app.

Online magazines likeUGSMAG and The Next Web are both perfect examples of card layouts used to showcase recent post content.

Bold colors

Color highly influences the perception of an object and communicates a certain emotional energy that differs from culture to culture. It works because it’s straightforward and powerful. We have seen some amazing redesigns in the startup ecosystem including Airbnb, Uber, Medium and Spotify, just to name a few. In 2016, we’ll see a continuous growth of the bold color trend.

The rise of Material Design

Flat design paradigm has evolved into a robust Material Design movement in the last couple of years. Material Design is a design language developed by Google GOOGL +0.80%. It has been announced on June 25, 2014, at the 2014 Google I/O conference. Many apps have been utilising this new design language and we’ll be seeing more websites utilising material design in 2016.

Greater Focus on UX Design

The field of user experience design will continue to grow rapidly with more designers and developers taking notice. UI design is part of UX design but it’s not the final goal. UI is a means to an end, with the end being a fantastic user experience.

Just 5 years ago I was barely familiar with UX or how it applied to interface design. Now we have resources like UX Stack Exchangeand free UX ebooks. If you don’t know much about user experience then now is the best time to study & learn how UX principles can be applied to all forms of digital interfaces.

Collaboration Tools for Design

Instant messaging and group chat has been around for well over a decade. However these resources have traditionally relied on plaintext with some capability to attach files.

A new emerging trend is the ability to share live design documents within chat applications. Notable is one example where annotations and comments can be layered right on top of a document. This gives designers a clean way to share work directly with everyone on a team.

Slack is the most popular chat application at the moment which supports many similar features. The growing Slack userbase has been adamant about creating extensions that greatly improve Slack’s capabilities.

Thanks a lot for reading us!

Yours, Cadabra

P.S. During the writing of this article, we used such a resources:

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