20 Hottest Trends To Watch Out For in

2013

WEB DESIGN

FAVORABLE IDEAS IN THE WEB DESIGN COMMUNITY

Keep your eyes peeled for examples of these trends.

Uniform web design. The big idea here is to think about website design as a single canvas which is dynamic and fluid by nature. CSS3 media queries allow developers to customize layouts based on limited or expanded screen real estate. Use this to your advantage and see how other designers are using it as well!

1. RESPONSIVE LAYOUTS

Twice as dense as any average LCD. web designers supporting retina devices will need to create two sets of http://media02.hongkiat.com/web-design-trend-2013/.

2. RETINA SUPPORT

But aside from the aesthetics, this bar also provides an exceptional user experience without needing to look very far to navigate the website.

3. FIXED HEADER BARS

4. LARGE PHOTO BACKGROUNDS

Excellent way to capture your visitor’s attention

This unique background photo behaves as custom branding for everybody who lands on his website.

One excellent example is on the Squarespace Blog where the central wrapper is given a background: transparent property.

5. CSS TRANSPARENCY

Access to a large consumer base from anywhere in the world. following the idea of minimalism. This is exemplified on the PictoPro webpage which offers a beautiful resource for cheap icons.

6. MINIMALIST LANDING PAGES

You can see a brilliant example of this technique on Keith Cakes contact page.

7. DIGITAL QR CODES

You can check practically any social community for sharing badges and will likely find a great solution. You can position these badges pinned to blog posts and articles anywhere in your layout. These are still used actively by readers and fans who want to share content quickly on places like Facebook, Twitter, or even LinkedIn.

8. SOCIAL MEDIA BADGES

A SMALL LIST OF SOCIAL MEDIA BADGES

StumbleUpon Badges

Google +1 Button

Pinterest Buttons

LinkedIn Share Badge

Hacker News Vote Badge

Dzone Vote Buttons

Free Social Media Icon Sets

Illustrations can be used in many various ways to bring about different moods in your website. Look around the Internet, and you will find many different website galleries and showcases focusing on digital illustrations. You can see these artistic works eventually blend into its website branding almost perfectly. MailChimp is probably the most definitive example with its trademark chimp mail carrier.

9. DETAILED ILLUSTRATIONS

Pinterest has adopted this loading technique for their layout and it works beautifully. You can search anything and the results page will continually load as you scroll down. Pagination is basically a non-issue and doesn’t even work as a detriment into the user experience. Talk about designing for simplicity!

10. INFINITE SCROLLING

Looking back over 2012 I would say my favorite example of this trend is on MediaFire’s homepage. The entire top portion of the page rotates between a series of slides. They each explain what you can do on MediaFire and how their features compare with other websites.

11. HOMEPAGE FEATURE TOURS

Right off the bat you may not think CaptainDash is any special website. But as you click through the navigation you will learn that each page is loaded in succession pushing from left-to-right. Dynamic effects such as these do not always bode well for mobile users.

12. SLIDING WEBPAGE PANELS

Enter this beautiful design trend of mobile navigation toggle menus. The Treehouse Blog is merely one example of this technique which looks brilliant on your smartphone. And even in your web browser! But there are dozens of websites and design studios who have adopted this trend for their own responsive layouts.

13. MOBILE NAVIGATION TOGGLE

Alex Pierce has a great website layout which does focus deeply on typography. You can see this includes rich text effects using CSS3 properties. Additionally the website is very easy to navigate, and many of the other page elements appear oversized as well.

14. FULLSCREEN TYPOGRAPHY

Open APIs and resources like Github allow designers to not only prototype layouts, but also animations and effects on the page. jQuery has a practically uncountable number of plugins for free download to be found all over the Web.

15. APIS AND OPEN SOURCE

I believe the problems that designers had to face years ago stemmed from box shadows being too difficult to implement. Back a few years, this effect would require some type of JavaScript or direct background http://media02.hongkiat.com/web-design-trend-2013/ created in Photoshop. Now box shadows can be generated with a few lines in CSS.

16. DEEP BOX SHADOWS

Another excellent and very inspiring example comes from a CSS alerts tutorial on Codrops. Notice how you can setup various times and settings for the animations.

17. CSS3 ANIMATIONS

The port fo l io on Riot Industr ies is a great example for newer web des igners . Check out how the navigat ion l inks work and how the port fo l io entr ies are dynamic on hover eff ects .

T h i s t ex t u red eff ec t i s a p p a r ent i n o t he r v e r t i c a l l ay ou t s a s w e l l , s uc h a s t he C SS g a l l e ry Des i g n Bo m b s.

18. VERTICAL NAVIGATION

I think the website design for Cage App is possibly one great example of many trends listed in this article. They are utilizing a single-page layout brilliantly with content split up by horizontal containers. But you will also notice the very top of the page features a blurred background photo effect.

19. SINGLE-PAGE WEB DESIGN

The portfolio of Lucia Soto is basically one terrific example of circular web design. The website is built dynamically so you are panning horizontally to different segments in the page. You will notice some cute vector artwork dotted along the sidelines as well. Web designers crave these extra tidbits in page layouts because they ooze uniqueness.

20. CIRCULAR DESIGN ELEMENTS

User interface design is one of the most complex topics when building digital products. This rings especially true for website layouts, trying to match navigations and content styles for a successful user experience. These design trends aim to point designers in the right direction.

FINAL THOUGHTS