It’s the end of the year. Traditionally a time for looking back, but savvy B2B marketers know it’s important to keep an eye on the web design trends that could spell the difference between website success and failure in the year ahead.
As a business owner, you’re likely too busy to delve into the nitty-gritty of web design techniques, so you leave those details to your web team. But it doesn’t hurt to know what’s emerging as the hottest design trends of 2013.
To help keep you engaged in the design conversation, we’ve identified five areas hot topics. We’ve posed them as questions, with links to stellar examples of each trend. Go ahead; take a few minutes to explore each of the points below. You may not be an expert when you’re done, but you’ll at least start to sound like one. And in this competitive market, that can mean a lot.
Will responsive design become a standard for web design? Responsive websites respond to their environment. Responsively designed websites are only valuable in today’s increasingly mobile word. Responsive design means you design one website and it adapts to different screen sizes–desktop, tablet, and mobile.
Will parallax design become more popular than single-page/vertical scrolling websites? Parallax design completely shifts how a view scrolls through a website. In web design, the parallax effect is a relatively new trend. The effect itself has been around for a while, but lately is becoming more used and talked about.
Will the 2012 tablet explosion (iPad, Surface, Nexus, Windows 8, etc.) create a need for specialized tablet versions of websites? Most website can easily be designed and developed for tablet use in mind, but that may not be enough any more. In general, there are at least five key differences between designing websites for tablets, and designing for desktops and laptops.
Will we see more use of infographics in web design? USA Today may have invented the infographic in print, but the design element is making a big splash on the web. A new infographic is featured every day on this eye-popping site.
With web fonts becoming more accessible/affordable, will typography in web design be used in new ways? One example is Typecast, currently in a public beta, which allows web designers and developers to combine and compare different web fonts directly from the browser.
