Keeping up with the trends of web design is no easy task. The industry keeps the ball rolling on a daily basis with new techniques and innovative ideas. But, what happens when there are no more ideas? It’s kind of the same situation with clothing styles. There are only so many styles before generational clothes start to repeat themselves, but with an updated look.
If you jump back to about 10 years ago on the web, you’ll see a lot of boxes or cascading style sheets creating tables to put data in. Everything was pretty plain, and basic with some color, and a couple of images, nothing too fancy. As Internet technology progressed, we slowly made the jump from plain and simple to the other extreme, where some websites completely ran off of flash, making everything animated, everything colorful, and had no strict organization. But, just like fluorescent spandex pants, Flash started to move on out due to the overbearing appearance and blinding effects. This already outdated technology just isn’t tolerated in professional environments anymore, due to the many impatient Internet surfers.
There was also a point in time where web designers felt that they had to squeeze their entire website onto the homepage in order to please viewers, similar to tight leather pants. When they realized this may not be the case, there was another drastic leap made to the opposite end of the spectrum; creating websites with maybe just one word on the homage connecting to many other pages, or even just a simple picture with only a couple of buttons. Whatever the case is, they missed the point that viewers do want to see as much as possible at first click, but there is a fine line between not enough to look at, and way too much too look at. Today, designers seem to have found some middle ground at this point in time, and it seems that web pages have a better flow to them. There is an even distribution of images, content, and options to choose from in regards to which part of the site you want to focus on. This was what digital marketing agencies have been focusing on too.
When trends make a full circle after you swore you’d never use the same look twice, and you’d never throw on those super flared faded jeans again, the industry finds a way to revamp the look, slap a new name on it and make it even more popular then it was the first time around. Those boring rectangular website buttons we were quite fond of in the early 2000’s left quick, being replaced by rounded corners and thousands of shadows to make buttons look like they were jumping off of the page for you to click on. Now, box buttons are back in style, but with an added feature of realism. We the designers have come to realize that you don’t need extra deep drop shadows to add a sense of realness to an image, it’s more about the gloss, the inner shadows, and the fine details within the button. It’s an art.
That brings us where we are today: utilizing the knowledge of the great artists and integrating them with web design. The realism in today’s designs are quite visually appealing and easy on the eye. They make the viewers feel as though the website has come to life and it could actually be a tangible product. Marketers and sales people always know that selling a product you can touch and feel is far easier to sell then the intangible products. While you might not be able to touch a website, you can have control over the usability, and feel the sense of reality being presented.
We as web designers have also learned, just like the fashion designers, that there is a recipe for creating a visual appeal as well as comfort to the buyer. Every customer wants to have a fashionable sense, but also be comfortable in what they are displaying, while also having simplicity surround them. You don’t need to be bold to be beautiful anymore; you just need to look put together, clean, strong and functional.
In conclusion, don’t throw out the hot pink scrunchies, the crimping irons, washed out jeans, and boring simple website buttons, just improve them by providing a fresh new look, and create a modern classic instead. Move on up and join us in 2011, the era of simplicity and realism.
If you’d like to have a fashionable and trend setting website to fit in with the top web designs of 2011, visit: www.one27studios.com and we’ll give your website an extreme makeover.