Latest Website Design Trends
Web designers are mercurial lot! They love to experiment and therefore, keep setting new trends in design. Here are 5 of the latest website design trends for the year 2009.
- Embossing Letterpress – A highly unexpected website design trend, letterpress or pressed letter is a technique that hasn’t been in use for quite a while now. However, the re-emergence of this trend indicates a revival. Letterpress can be used in many different styles for a wide spectrum of websites and topics. But pressed letters are used more for online services sites and product designs.
- Rich User Interfaces – User interfaces have seen a dramatic shift. They have become more usable and definitely, more good looking. Rich user interfaces contribute towards increasing the popularity of websites and applications as they create more intuitive and rich interfaces. There is more white space, more padding, and use of many other design elements.
- PNG transparency – This trend is gaining much popularity. Today, website designers are sparing no efforts to integrate background images into the web page content giving it a printed media like appearance. Semi-transparent backgrounds highlight design elements like headlines etc. PNG transparency is used in headers/footers, though some adventurous designers go beyond this as well.
- HUGE Typography – It’s no longer big. It’s HUGE now! Yes, from design agencies to product websites and from portfolios to online services everyone is using large typography to emphasise the important message of their sites. Font size is now more than 36 pixels and some expensive, yet eye-catching typefaces are being used to grab eyeballs.
- Modal Boxes/Dialog Windows – Also known as ‘Lightboxes’ are 2nd generation pop-ups. They are user-friendly and focus user attention on the more important areas of a website. Modal windows typically appear on the top of the page content and are often semi-transparent with a close button.