Web Design Trends for 2011

Posted: 17 January 2011 In: Technology

It’s very important to stay up to speed with the latest technology, and becoming an increasingly vital part of the development cycle is the design, and intuitive user interfaces.

2011 is here and it’s time to see what to expect, below are a few great posts we’ve found that cover web design trends for 2011, together with some extracts we found useful to us.

The state of web design (webdesign.tutsplus.com

Web design trends 2010 (1stwebdesigner.com

A Typographic Explosion

2010 has seen a few major changes to the underlying technology that actually make this claim legitimate. Primarily, the huge amount of growth of font-replacement technology, where third party companies host fonts that designers can use in live development environments. Happy days!

The Death of the Fold

The traditional “fold” (the imaginary line on a screen that designates what content is visible before a viewer needs to scroll) became vague, unimportant, and nearly irrelevant in 2010.

Screens nowadays come in all shapes and sizes, from mobile phones to massive HDTVs. It’s not only the resolution that can vary wildly though its also the aspect ratio. Sure, be advised to keep the most important messages of a site near the top, but with so many new ways for web-surfers to view the web, there’s no longer a defined height for where content must be above.

Grid Intensive Layouts

Grid layouts aren’t new, but web designers are starting to break away from traditional web layouts (header, content column, sidebar, footer) in favor of more unique, grid driven layouts that can actually adapt to the viewers screen resolution.

Print design influence

Serif fonts, more graphics, grid systems, and more of other print design aspect have become the inspiration that influenced web design in this year. The point of getting influence from print design is that it has had to be high impact to grab attention and communicate clearly.

Texture, Texture, Texture

Textures aren’t new, but as each year passes we see it being integrated in new and interesting ways. We are entering a style phase where more designs are starting to feel “touchable”. We’re seeing more subtle, well designed textures that repeat naturally. Yummy!

Mobile Sites

2010 has seen a huge push towards entire sub-sites that are designed specifically to be viewed on small, handheld screens. It forces designers to get creative with a relatively small amount of real estate. Succeeding in the mobile environment isn’t tough if you keep a few rules in mind: Messages need to be conveyed quicker and with more efficiency, Links have to be designed for a touchscreen environment, and text needs to become legible.

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