Design Trends for the New Year
The new year always brings lots of predictions of what the hottest web design trends will be for the year. One post I looked at listed a dozen trends. Here are three that I would nod in agreement about:
Web animation - so popular in the early days of the web, it fell into disfavor when Flash was all the rage and when that fell away there was a lull in animation. Animation is back and used with more discretion than before.
The animated GIF is back in many social networks and in judicious use on websites. Why? Basic animated GIFs can be read by almost anything. Sure, some are rather annoying brief video loops made for laughs but others actually add information or design elements to a page or in marketing emails.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is finding a place in mainstream web design. One way we'll see it used is with conversational interfaces (chatbots). What is sometimes called "artificial narrow intelligence" (ANI) in applications such as voice assistants like Google Home and Apple’s Siri and recommendation technologies such as those used by Amazon, Spotify and Netflix. Interacting with bots will be more common and conversational interfaces and I believe the goal will be to make them natural and invisible. Many designers might be learning how to build a chatbot interface in 2018.
We could hardly say that mobile web is new this year, but because 2017 was the year that mobile web usage overtook desktop browsing, there will be more mobile audience focus this year. Some designers will design sites initially for mobile and think about laptop/desktop views as secondary. And let us include here app design as some clients won't even want a traditional website, especially because mobile functionality can allow for things that the desktop does not offer, such as interactions with a camera, some location services, gestures and swiping and better access to contacts.
The animated GIF is back in many social networks and in judicious use on websites. Why? Basic animated GIFs can be read by almost anything. Sure, some are rather annoying brief video loops made for laughs but others actually add information or design elements to a page or in marketing emails.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is finding a place in mainstream web design. One way we'll see it used is with conversational interfaces (chatbots). What is sometimes called "artificial narrow intelligence" (ANI) in applications such as voice assistants like Google Home and Apple’s Siri and recommendation technologies such as those used by Amazon, Spotify and Netflix. Interacting with bots will be more common and conversational interfaces and I believe the goal will be to make them natural and invisible. Many designers might be learning how to build a chatbot interface in 2018.
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