The World Wide Web has changed rapidly since its inception, and all web related industries are evolving at a lightning fast pace. Web design is no exception, with new trends and patterns emerging on a yearly basis.

We’re now at the half way point through 2016 and can clearly see the new web trends and styles that are becoming more prominent, as well as the trends that are on-going from previous years.

We have compiled a short list of the top web design trends for 2016, with explanations into what these trends are and why they are popular.

Big, Real Imagery

For a very long time, a lot of websites have suffered from too many cheesy stock photos: fake looking images of picture perfect people wearing with overly happy smiles and shiny suits. It’s been proven in eye tracking studies that users tend to gloss over these types of images.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Imagery is used to illustrate a message or information so it’s important to do it right. A striking, real image will be much more engaging and convey emotion, allowing you to genuinely make a connection with your audience.

Video & Animation

Websites are great tools for telling stories. To add on to the emotional power of a great image, this is enhanced even further by integrating video into the website. With the ever improving internet speeds and access to high definition content, and possibly even 3D, video being embedded in backgrounds as well included in page content is rapidly increasing in popularity.

Additionally, users do much prefer to digest content in video format – proven with the fact that over 50 billion video views per month, and over 100 hours of video being uploaded per minute to YouTube.

Personal Branding

No longer should identities be hidden from the web. With personal branding, you are becoming a brand – promoting a perception of yourself that you want others to see, allowing you to align your image and vision in a positive way with your business.

It’s much more effective to get people to connect with you, a human, than it is with a corporate brand. Promoting yourself in this way will allow this emotional connection to be associated with your company too.

Showing the person or people behind a company goes a long way to proving to customers that both you and your business is trustworthy. This can be achieved with a personal photo, a small amount of text about you as a person, and possibly even links to your personal social media accounts.

Modular Design

Modular design is also knows as card or tile design. This involves content being displayed in a grid with different sizes, shapes and information contained in each content box.

While not the newest of web trends, it is certainly gaining traction as it is incredibly adaptable to different purposes. Also, with the massive expansion in mobile and tablet devices accessing the world wide web, the flexibility of modular grids combined with responsive design allows the content to stack appropriately and look fantastic on any screen size.

Less Pages

Not too long ago, web design was all about ‘the fold’. This is the area of a page that is visible when the page loads without scrolling. It has always been a challenge to cram as much important information in this area as possible, with many links to other pages, as users tended not to scroll down to read content.

However in 2016, this has changed completely! Users now much prefer scrolling down a page to see more content, rather than having to go through the process of clicking through to new pages and waiting for them to load.

A big influence in the reversal is the prominence of mobile devices. It’s much easier on a small touch screen device to keep swiping downwards for more, rather than trying to navigate through different pages via a menu.

As a result, modern websites often have very few pages, simple websites sometimes have the entire content displayed on a single page.

Conclusion

While there are no radical changes to design methods this year, there are a lot of existing trends from several years ago that are still increasing in popularity. It’s expected that a lot of these trends will continue growing over the next few years, although inevitably some will fall out of favour over time. Web design evolves extremely rapidly, adapting to technological advancements and user behaviour, so who knows where we will be in 5 or 10 years time!

Alex Induchny

Director

Alex is the creative mind behind all the projects that run through the business. With over 8 years creative experience he is driven and passionate about everything!