16 Web & Graphic Design Trends to Watch in 2016

1. Usability

• In 2016, design is all about the user. User experience (UX) is the new black.

• No one will care about how cool your design looks, if it’s not usable.

• Your online business won’t grow if you don’t take user experience into account.

• Your website needs to load fast and be easy to use.

• Page Load Speed is a great issue. Adding just one second of bloat to your site means sales drop by 27%.

2.Responsive Design

• Mobile is already the “first screen”.

• Google is literally crushing sites that don’t offer a mobile-friendly experience.

• User experience on mobile phone is key.

• Hiding a desktop function for mobile users is not an acceptable solution anymore.

• If your users can’t fully experience your website on their daily metro conmutes, then your whole site needs to be revised.

• In 2016 the meaning of responsive design goes even further.

• Now, all your graphic design and artwork will have to adhere to the rules of responsive. No “one size or format fits all”.

• The best example of this is the recent Netflix brand redesign.

3. App inspired web design • Websites should learn from app design

(speed, zero distractions, tailored user experience).

• Remove all unessential information and let the user interact with your content as fast as he can.

4.Clever menus

• Some people hated the now omnipresent Hamburger Menu or navicon. Now, say hello to clever menus.

• Hidden navigations that appear out of nowhere depending on the user’s actions will soon be the norm.

• Even if we can’t see it at the moment, experience tells us that there is a menu on every website. So no need to worry, it will just appear when we need it.

• Experts are predicting that clever / hidden menus will be fully responsive to multidirectional scrolling.

5.Modules and modular text

• No one likes to read a dreadfully long blurb of text.

• The first trick to breakdown long texts in the web was to try to write in short paragraphs.

• But you can take a modular approach to web page layout.

• Modular design is a technique where everything is built using a block grid pattern.

• This doesn’t mean a boring pattern, like a chessboard.

• In fact, it can mean exactly the opposite: hard to anticipate patterns, that make it easy for us to read and be interested in the different parts of a website.

Image: Well Made Studio

6. Modular and infinite scrolling

• Modular scrolling means every module on a website may scroll on its own, independently from the other modules.

• You may have already seen it (though sometimes it’s hard to notice) in sites with a sidebar that doesn’t scroll at the same speed than the main content.

• But it’s about to get better. Picture a website divided in two columns with independent scroll, as you can see here.

• It all began with infinite scroll. A trend that you may have noticed in 2015. Some of the most popular sites on the world today, like Pinterest, Twitter or Facebook already use it.

• Infinite and modular scroll work on the same premise: scrolling down is easier and faster than clicking and it doesn’t interrupt user experience by loading a new page.

• Time.com’s bounce rate dropped 15 percentage points after they adopted infinite scrolling (source).

7. Material Design

• Material design wasn’t widely adopted until 2015.

• But Material as a trend that you’ll find in websites, apps, artwork, etc. will be adopted massively during 2016.

• It will be the year of material design’s dominance.

• Expect to see those long, solid shadows virtually everywhere.

8.Flat Design

• Material design came along to fix some of flat design’s usability problems, but that doesn’t mean flat is dead.

• In fact, flat design will also grow to be even more popular during 2016.

• With a lot of big brands adopting flat design in the last few years, mass audiences are more aware that less is better when it comes to visual style.

Images credit: Brafton

• Flat web design has another UX advantage: image files weigh less and do not add to page load time.

• The general guidelines of flat design will be widely spread around small brands and blogs artwork all over the web (eg, ghost buttons).

• At the same time, those on the know on graphic design will be moving on to Flat 2.0.

9.Visual Storytelling

Some data:

• 100 million people worldwide watch at least one video per day.

• Website visitors are 64% more likely to make a purchase after watching a video.

• 80% of viewers recall watching a video ad up to 30 days after seeing it.

• 92% of those watching video on mobile devices share the content with others.

• Human beings process visual elements 60,000 times faster than reading words.(Source).

• Now, design needs to play a content function; it won’t be a mere companion to the text that tells the story anymore.

10. Infographics

• Everyone loves a good infographic, and above all, they love the results: infographics are shared 3 more times than any other piece of visual content.

• What kind of infographics are we going to see generating buzz in 2016?

• The time of boring old infographics based on the same old templates are about to fade away. Putting three or four bullet points and adding a few cute icons just won’t cut it anymore.

• It’s time to mix infographic storytelling capabilities with the deep insight of data visualizations. Infographic and big data together.

11. Cool Typography • With typography becoming a key element

in any serious branding efforts, broad audiences are g designers etting used to seeing more artistic typefaces.

• Typography is a language in itself.

• Years ago, only graphic were able to talk that language.

• Today, more people are gaining access to it, thanks to the wider range of available web fonts.

• 2016 will see a comeback of big fonts, italic and all caps for logos and headings.

• Another big trend here are typefaces that appear to come from someone holding a pen.

12. Modern retro • Modern retro is cool. It started as a trend in logo

design and it’s already permeating to web and graphic design.

• There’s a subtle difference in what retro means now. Old retro refers to early 20th century, up until the 60s.

• Modern retro is all about the early days of computer age: think vintage video games, pixel art, big cell phones, Tron…

• Anything that was big in visual style between the late 70s and early 90s is back!

13. Rich colors • When it comes to colors, the 80s will rule.

Prepare for a world of bright pastels and rich, bold accent colors.

• “A happier, sunnier place where we feel free to express a wittier version of our real selves”, in the words of the Pantone Fashion Color Report For Spring 2016.

• The Top10 2016 spring colors according to Pantone look like this:

• Whatever you do, just don’t pick a boring, washed-out color. You’ve been warned.

14. Grids and geometrical shapes • Grid design is a clear system, easy to work with for

designers, plus the users can easily understand it and use it very easily too.

• But every trend has its flip side, and experts also predict that, as a response there will be a rise in free-form shapes.

• These are just like geometrical shapes, but with dents.

• Rough edged and hand-drawn shapes are a signature of neo-grunge, another trend that will gain prominence in 2016.

15. Kill The Stock Photo! • Stock photos are one of the most boring and

unoriginal things you can include in a website.

• 2015 was the year that a host of free alternative stock photos sites tried to make it more accesible for anyone to get quality stock images in their sites.

• Everyone ended up picking the same photos and you found them everywhere online, over and over again.

• Why use stock photos? You have millions of alternatives.

• Please use images custom made for your site, either by yourself or by a professional.

• What about a hand-drawn illustration? (You’ll see a lot of these in 2016).

• Or a custom graphic? Or even better, what about video?

16. Video & GIFs • You’ve probably noticed all those cool websites

with video backgrounds.

• Most of them take a long time to load, but that will change once people understand they have to compress the video as much as possible.

• Video will replace images in lots of places, other than website backgrounds.

• Vine, Snapchat et al have gotten us into the habit of staring at short video loops.

• Watch out for profile pictures that are not pictures anymore, but a short video

• Above all, watch out for the invasion of animated GIFs.

• Facebook is to blame for opening the Pandora Box and they will soon be EVERYWHERE.

So what do you think: Will my predictions be spot on, or will they utterly fail?

Please let me know in the comments.

Thanks! @VisualErnesto