With 2014 soon ending it’s time to look ahead and see what we can expect from the web design trends of 2015.  2014 has been an interesting year, code free builders, parallax effects, background videos and flat design have shown huge popularity and they are all constantly evolving to enhance the user experience.

Search engines are placing more emphasis on user experience when it comes to ranking, the design and user experience of your website could not be as crucial as it is today. Lets take a look at some of these latest designs trends and see what next year has in store for us.

Responsive Design

With the emergence of mobile devices and super speed mobile internet, websites are seeing a growing number of mobiles visitors. eMarketer estimates there will be 1.75 Billion smartphone users in 2014. This huge growth in mobile devices has led to the responsive design framework which enables one website design to respond to the users device and change its layout to accommodate the different screen sizes. This is still a technology in its infancy and with many responsive designs, usability can suffer, as it’s kind of a one size fits all work around.

A carefully planned responsive design will improve user experience and increase the brands trust as it shows they care about how they are represented across all mediums. At the very least your website should be responsive, but you may also want to think about a native app or a custom mobile site if your website requires specific functionality. Most content blogs will be fine with a responsive design. Check Design Modo’s comparison between Mobile Site, Responsive and App options available for web owners.

Flat Design

As a graphic designer I am happy to see the growing trend in flat design. With its root firmly placed in the International Typographic Style, which is what many now call the ‘corporate’ look. Flat design puts usability first and throws out the clutter that was once used to try and make us go ‘oooooooohhhhh’. Drop shadows, bevels, gradients, shiny buttons are now being replaced with white space, clean layouts, simple colour palettes and vector illustrations. For inspiration, enjoy the work above from Tom Eckersley, one of my favourite graphic designers. He was mastering the ‘flat design’ aesthetic as early as the 1940’s.

Grid Layout

Pinterest got it right with their grid structure and websites such as Airbnb have followed the trend. Look at almost any WordPress theme and you will see an option to place the contents in a grid structure made up of ‘cards’. We have also seen the introduction of many ‘one page’ style of designs which opt for scrolling instead of clicking  when navigating the site. Product based websites have also benefited from this design trend. Just take a look at Fiverr who have adopted a grid structure with infinite scroll. This allows the users to quickly and easily browse a page without having to click too much.

Larger Images and Video

Bigger is better and in 2015 expect to see larger, full screen photo and video backgrounds. It’s led to some very interesting design’s in 2014. My favourite being jyundesign.com which executes the full screen video perfectly and immediately grabs the users attention.

Typography

In the past WordPress and other platforms did not have much in terms of typographic choice. Only expensive, professionally designed sites had access to web type kits. Now with type kits such as Google Fonts offering such a wide range of free fonts, designers can now utilise the power of typography in their websites. Many themes now include the option to customise fonts used in their theme, everything from body text to titles can be tweaked. This allows even those with a small budget to use type in a more meaningful way.

In 2015 I think responsive will become the industry standard in web design. I don’t see anything being designed today that isn’t optimized for mobile devices too. How it evolves I do not know. Making websites more personal for users will also start to emerge in 2015. We already see websites such as Amazon and Youtube studying our browsing habits to show us recommendations, this could develop into websites being entirely unique to each of us based on our previous interactions.

I look forward to see how web design develops in 2015, what do you think will be the biggest change in web design for 2015?