2015 Website Design Trends

The beautiful thing about website design is that is forever changing from year to year. This excites us because we are always looking for ways to better improve the products (aka websites) we provide to our clients. We love this ever changing environment because it allows us to express our creative/innovative side.

So we have comes up with a list of website design trends that we think will be important/dominant in this coming year:

1. Mobile-first designs will always be extremely important when it comes to your website’s design (If you did know that already). Responsive designs provide the best online viewers experience. Here are some stats for you: 25 percent of Internet users only access the internet via a mobile device in the United States. Also more than 20 percent of Google searches are now being performed on some sort of mobile device (source).
2. Full/wide fluid screen overall create a better experience for viewers. This proper use of space anywhere from a 27” to 7” tablet is extremely important for aesthetic appeal. We personally think that a site this is edge-to-edge is the way to go. Keep in mind the sizing of elements and text based on relative viewport.
3. Beautiful full screen images are key. Yes, it’s been a trend for a few years but I think this will be the year everyone does. There are more and more Creative Commons Zero (CC0) locations for incredible images. These are some sites that we utilize: Unsplash, Pexels, Jay Mantri.
4. Scrolling triggered element behaviours are awesome! (This too has been a trend for a while, but it’s becoming more popular). When you scroll text slides or fades in, or as you scroll a monitors images scrolls too, etc. see the Square Space website for a perfect example.
5. Smaller amounts of text is something we think will be big. Web pages seem to have less and less text, and placing the copy in bigger spaces.
6. Parallax images offering something interesting and fun for websites (see Google drive’s page, the image moves with the scrolling at a different pace.)

These are sites we consider to be the top shelf of early 2015:

• harrys.com/our-factory
• squarespace.com/home/overview/
• mailchimp.com/features/
• google.com/drive/

Some honourable mentions:

• Bright energetic colours instead of pale or dull brand colours.
• Flatter designs, a lot less andor more subtle gradients and shadows
• SSL sure, it’s not a ‘design trend’ it’s on the development side, however we predict SSL (the little green lock icon you see in your address bar on popular and private websites) will be more-and-more common this year with Google improving ranking for encrypted sites as well as projects like Let’s Encrypt.

The trends for 2015 when it comes to website designs will bring some great elements to websites. Please note that these are our thoughts on what the trends will be. What do you think will be trending this year? Share your thoughts!